LET'S HEAR IT FOR HANS!.
It's late! Far too late!
A man by the name of Hans Lippershey , a eyeglass maker in Holland in the early 1600, put together a presentable telescope well ahead of others. He made it when school children held lens types together and found they could bring the village church tower closer. Two lens types, held in line could work such magic. Lippershey slapped a tube over the two lens and it worked even better.
It's time we set the record straight
Lippershey called his invention a “Looker”,,“kilker”, in his native Dutch language, and in 1608 from his home in Middle burg, Netherlands he applied to the Belgian government for a patent. It is reported that he was well paid for his invention in his own time, but one of the strange quirks of history is that Belgian officials refused to grant a patent for the odd reason that: “it was felt the invention was so simple that it could not be kept a secret.”
That odd decision strikes us as being a bit weird today. We no longer thin patents as protecting our secrets.
Galileo Galilei is not the only contender, and historians say he was aware of Lippershey's creation before he came one of his own. Some historians beat the drum loudly in favor of one Giambattista della Porta, who wrote about the recently discovered convex and concave lens advancements, but Galileo has been credited by the general public as the inventor of the telescope. But that has not been the end of it all. Two other Dutch spectacle makers, Hans and Zacharias Janssen, who lived about the same time as Lippershey (1570-1619) are said to have invented a telescopes apparatus, and a Dutch diplomat, William Boreel, who apparently knew all three of them during their lens making days in Middleburg, claimed openly that Lippershey stole the idea from the Janssen brothers. He make the accusation so loudly and so often that, in time, people discredited his overly zealous support of the Janzzens.
In far off Naples, Giambattista della Porta wrote about the newly discovered lens and their qualities of being concave and convex and surmised that ”if one knew how to combine them exactly they could see both distant and near objects larger than they would otherwise appear and very distinct.” One fact that sets Hans Lippershey ahead of the others is that he was the first to describe the telescope in documentary form, while other talked about the potential of such an application.
Now that we have “Hubble” out there in space churning out sizzling photographs from far off places beyond our wildest dreams
what can re-hashing all of this telescope squabble mean to us today?
Imagine, if you will, what future arguments are being fed and fattened even now by a score or more of young men and women all over the world - generating inventions to be discovered any day now! They are contenders and they are all around us. You may be one of them. I have no way of knowing, but wherever you are be sure to put your ideas to written form. Get your ideas past the “expert” patent people of our time and put a mark on your rightful place among our great inventors and benefactors of Mankind.
In the meantime, join with me. Let's hear it for Hans Lippershey remembered today by so many as just another also-ran.
A.L.M. July 21, 2003 [c614wds]
