Historical Timeline for Telescopes

It seems all the technology for telescopes started back in 2560 BC. Artisans in ancient Egypt polished rocks, glass, and semi-precious stones to make eyes for the sarcophagi. What follows is some major points in the history of how telescopes came to be today.

• In 470 BC, Mozi, a Chinese philosopher, focused the sun's rays by using concave mirrors.

• In 4 BC, Seneca the Younger used water to magnify letters and words.

• In 23, Pliny the Elder discovered doctors using a crystal ball with the sun's rays beaming through it to cauterize wounds.

• In the ninth century, telescopes were possibly made from Visby lenses, a Middle Eastern glass.

• In 1520, Leonard Digges, an English mathematician, invented two telescopes – Reflecting and Refracting.

• In 1608, A Dutch lensmaker, Hans Lippershey, applied for a patent on a design for a telescope.

• In 1609, Galileo improved on Lippershey's design and renamed it “perspicillum” - An Italian word for telescope.

• In 1616, Niccolo Zucchi invented a reflecting telescope.

• In 1663, James Gregory, a Scottish mathematician, produces a telescope with a parabolic primary mirror and an elliptical secondary mirror.

• In 1668, Isaac Newton designed a telescope using a parabolic primary mirror and a flat diagonal secondary mirror.

• In 1733, Chester Moore Hall created the achromatic lens.

• In 1880, Ernst Abbe invented the first orthoscopic eyepiece.

• In 1910, The Ritchey-Chretien telescope that is used in many of the large astronomical telescopes is invented by George Ritchey and Henri Chretien.

• In 1930, The Schmidt camera is created by Bernhard Schmidt.

• In 1937, Grote Reber developed a telescope for wavelengths ranging from radio to Xrays.

• In 1944, The Maksutov telescope is designed by Dmitri Maksutov.

• In 1962, The UK launched an orbiting solar telescope.

• In 1990, the Hubble Telescope was launched into space.

• In 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope will be launched and take the place of the Hubble.

And this all started with the polishing of a few stones.

By: Simon Tay, the author of Your Personal Development Website: http://www.simontay.com