The Long Route to the Invention of the Telescope
Transactions, American Philosophical Society (Vol. 98, Part 5)

Rolf Willach (Author), Albert van Helden (Contributions by)

9781606189856

Paperback / softback, published 1 January 2008

116 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.434 kg

"An extraordinary and valuable contribution to the history of astronomy and its material culture… [T]he most exciting thesis on the development of the telescope to appear in decades… Willach's volume will inform any serious early telescope scholarship for the foreseeable future, and should be read by anyone interested in the origins of the telescope." - Marvin Bolt (Journal for the History of Astronomy)

After the telescope became known in 1608-1609, a number of people in widely separate locations claimed that they had such a device long before the announcement came from The Hague; in the summer of 1608, no one had a telescope, in the summer of 1609, everyone had one. For a number of years author Rolf Willach has quietly tested early spectacle lenses in museums and private collections, and now he reports on this study, which gives an entirely new explanation of the invention of the telescope and solves the conundrum mentioned above. Willach is an optical engineer and independent scholar who worked for several years at the Inst. of Astronomy in Bern. He has written extensively on the history of the development of optics and the telescope. Illus.