06 THE HISTORY OF THE TELESCOPE. 



Galileo learned in 1009, while visiting Venice, tliat a marvellous in- 

 strument had been invented the preceding year in Holland, which 

 would enable an observer to see a distant object with the same distinct- 

 ness as if it were only at a small fraction of its real distance. It required 

 but little time for the greatest physicist of his age to master the prob- 

 lem thus suggested to his mind, and after his return to Padua, where he 

 held the position of professor of mathematics in the famous university 

 of that city, he set himself earnestly to work making telescopes. Such 

 was his success that in August of the same year he sent to the Vene- 

 tian senate a- more perfect instrument than they had been able to pro- 

 cure from Holland; and in January of the next year, by means of a 

 telescope magnifying thirty times, he discovered the four satellites of 

 Jupiter. This brilliant discovery was followed by that of the mountains 

 in the moon ; of the variable x>li<ises of Venus, which established the 

 Goiiernican theory of the solar system as incontestible, and of the true 

 nature of the Milky Way, together with many others of less philosoph- 

 ical impoi'tance. Though Galileo did not cliange the character of the 

 telescope as it was known to its discoverer in Holland, he made it 

 much more perfect; and above all, made the first and most fertile ap- 

 plication of the instrument to increase the bounds of human knowledge, 

 so that it is inevitable that his name should be indissolubly connected 

 with the instrument. Thus the form which he used is to this day 

 known as the Galilean telescope. 



Considering the enormcms interest excited throughout intellectual 

 Europe by the invention of the telescope, it seems surprising that its 

 early history is so confused. Less than two years after it was first 

 heard of, a discovery, iterhaps the greatest of a thousand years in the 

 domain of natural philosophy, had been made by its means. Notwith- 

 standing these facts, the three contemporary, or nearly contemporary, 

 investigators assign the honor to three different persons, and if we 

 should write out the names of all those to whom more modern writers 

 have attributed the invention, the list would be a long one. The sur- 

 prise will not be boundless, however, if we consider the task before a 

 historian in the next century who undertakes to justly apportion the 

 honor of the invention of the telephone among its numerous claimants. 

 The analogy, though suggested in the obvious fact that the telephone 

 is to hearing just what the telescope is to sight, may be made much 

 closer if we could imagine the future historian de[>rived of all but verbal 

 description, that contemporary diagrams and models were wholly want- 

 ing. Under such conditions it is difficult to believe that the historian 

 would easily escape ante-dflting the discovery of the telephone projjcr 

 on account of descriptions, generally imi)eriect, of the acoustic tele- 

 phone. But this would fairly represent the condition of the material 

 at the command of an investigator of the present day into a question 

 of science of the early part of the seventeenth century. No wonder, 

 then, that the invention has been attributed to Archimedes, to Jloger 



