The origins of the telescope - DWC - KNAW

which Lipperhey had bought in January 1609 with the money he had received
for his three telescopes, remained. In about 1835, at De Kanter’s request, the
old name De Drie Vare Gesichten was painted again on its façade. This house
was eventually destroyed in May 1940, during the German bombardment of
Middelburg (ill. 8-B & 8-C).
1841: The discovery of an alleged Jansen telescope
In 1841, shortly after his inauguration, the Dutch King William II was scheduled
to visit Middelburg. In preparation for this event, the antiquarian Pieter
Johannes Rethaan Macaré, organized the first exhibition ever to honour the
glorious past of Zeeland. On that occasion, out of the blue, a certain Zacharias
Snijder stepped forward, claiming that he possessed the oldest examples of a
telescope made by Zacharias Jansen as a family heirloom. These objects – four
iron tubes with lenses – were put on display and shown to the king, who
praised them as the ‘first examples of an invention so priceless for the sciences.’
From that time onwards these tubes ‘which according to tradition were made
by Jansen in 1590’ were shown on several other occasions, thus establishing a
verisimilitude of its own. With the result that in 1850, when Rethaan Macaré’s
son was an alderman in the Middelburg government, following the demolishment
of the old houses at the ‘Nieuwe Kerk,’ a memorial stone was placed on
the spot where Jansen’s house had once stood. The text on this ‘very humble
monument’ reads as follows: ‘Against this wall stood the house of ZACHARIAS
JANSE, Inventor of the telescopes, in the year MDXC’ (ill. 9). 81
This simple token of honour was not enough in the eyes of the Utrecht
professor Pieter Harting, at that time the leading authority on optics in the
Netherlands. In 1858, in a widely-read popular journal, he pleaded vigorously
for the erection of a large monument in Gothic style for the two Middelburg
inventors, thus uniting the conclusions of Moll and De Kanter. 82 And although
Harting’s appeal went unheeded, he remained very interested in the invention.
A few years earlier, in 1853, in an assembly of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences, Harting had defended Jansen’s case as the inventor of
the microscope, rebutting an Italian paper by the Abt Redi, in which Cornelis
Drebbel of Alkmaar was put forward as the inventor. 83 And so, when in 1866,
81 Cf. Kroniek van het Historisch Genootschap te Utrecht, 2e serie, 7 (1851), 194-198; De Navorscher
1 (Bijblad 1853) 12, 450.
82 Harting, ‘De twee gewigtigste Nederlandsche uitvindingen’ (1859).
83 Harting and Matthes, ‘Verslag over den vermoedelijken uitvinder van het microskoop’ (1853).
Harting was in fact the author of this article, see page 118.
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