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 lens maker, 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.
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