Biography of Hans Lippershey | Dutch optic.

(Wesel, to 1570 - Middleburgh, to 1619) Dutch optic which is credited with the invention of the telescope. In the few documents that have your name appears also as Jan Lippershelm, Hans Lippershelm and Johan Lipperhey. I used to tour the European courts at the beginning of the 17TH century with a show that included a magnifier image tube, called in Dutch trzpień ("Inspector").

Hans Lippershey

In 1608 tried to patent a telescope fitted with a pair of sunglasses, a concave and another convex, which it termed perspicillum: was born the first astronomical telescope refractor. The manufacturer of lenses designed it with the idea of observing distant objects on the Earth's surface, not distant objects in the sky. That same year he offered to the Dutch Government for use on the battlefield. The State granted a bonus of 900 florins and modified his device in binocular. These devices soon crossed national borders and became generalized throughout Europe.

In reality, the invention of the telescope, equipped with two or more lenses device that allows viewing of distant objects, probably took place at the end of the 16th century. The philosopher Roger Bacon, the astronomer Leonard Digges and scholar Giambattista della Porta have been identified as the first designers of the instrument, which perhaps was built for the first time in Italy in 1590. However, until the first decade of the 17TH century, there is no effective evidence of the birth of the telescope, which was held in the Dutch city of Middelburg in the hands of Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen.

A French astronomer, Jacques Bovedere, said the possible applications of the Magnifier tube in the astronomical field in letter to Galileo Galilei, and in 1609 Galileo built several glasses without having seen models Dutch, using a convex lens to the goal and the other, divergent or convergent to the eyepiece. Thanks to them, he made important astronomical discoveries described in his book Sidereus Nuncius (1610). The new instrument would enable Galileo to revolutionize astronomy by discovering the craters of the Moon and the moons of Jupiter, identify sunspots and corroborate the heliocentric theory of Nicolás Copérnico, according to which the planets revolved around the Sun.

The problems of these first rudimentary glasses, operating by refraction, were overcome with the later development of reflectors or catoptricos, goggles properly called telescopes. They were introduced several lens in the eyepiece so that the images appear not reversed, but mostly avoided loss of light and increased clarity and the field of the images with the inclusion of mirrors concavoesfericos or parabolic. The telescope of the Franciscan monk Marin Mersenne's 1636, based on these innovations capable of overcoming chromatic aberrations which generated the refracting glasses lenses. In 1668, Isaac Newton built a telescope with the eyepiece located laterally on the outside of the tube, and in 1672 Cassegrain perfected it by inserting a mirror hyperboloid which facilitated the observation.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas