Telescopes

  • Period: 4000 BCE to

    Telescopes

  • 3500 BCE

    Phonenicians cooking on sand discover glass.

  • 424 BCE

    Aristophanes uses a glass sphere filled with water to start fires

  • 1400

    convex lenses to correct farsightedness are developed.

  • 1500

    concave lenses to correct nearsightedness are developed.

  • Hans Lippershey discovers that holding two lenses up some distance apart bring objects closer

  • Thomas Harriot becomes the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope

  • Galileo builds several telescopes to map the sky

  • The term "telescope" is coined by Prince Frederick Sesi

  • Johannes Kepler switches from a concave eyepiece to a convex eyepiece

  • Marin Mersenne using two paraboloidal mirrors instead of lenses

  • Rene Descartes demonstrated that speherical lenses cannot produce pinpoints of light

  • Robert Hooke invents an idea to reduce length of telescopes

  • Newton produces the first working reflective telescope

  • Johannus Hevelius realized that the longer the telescope was, the closer together the different colored points of light would be at the focal point

  • Christian Huygens suggests getting rid of the supporting structure and mounting the objective lens on the top of a long pole.

  • Chester Moor Hall develops an achromatic lens

  • Sir William Herschel constructs a forty foot long telescope with a four-foot diameter mirror.

  • H. Dennis Taylor, optical manager of T. Cooke & Sons of York, makers of astronomical telescopes, designed and patented the revolutionary, and now famous, triplet design