The 'True Inventor'
The ‘true inventor’ of the telescope. A survey of 400 years of debate Huib J. Zuidervaart There is no nation which has not claimed for itself the remarkable invention of the telescope: indeed, the French, Spanish, English, Italians, and Hollanders have all maintained that they did this. Pierre Borel, De vero telescopii inventore (1656) I. introduction Cultural Nationalism and Historical Constructs Who invented the telescope? From the very moment the telescope emerged as a useful tool for extending man’s vision, this seemingly simple question led to a bewildering array of answers. The epigram above, written in the mid- seventeenth century, clearly illustrates this point. Indeed, over the years the ‘invention’ of the telescope has been attributed to at least a dozen ‘inventors,’ from various countries1. And the priority question has remained problematic for four centuries. Even in September 2008, the month in which the 400th anniversary of the ‘invention’ was celebrated in The Netherlands, a new claim was put forward, when the popular monthly History Today published a rather speculative article, in which the author, Nick Pelling, suggested that the hon- our of the invention should nòt go to the Netherlands, but rather to Catalonia on the Iberian Peninsula.2 Pelling’s claim was picked up by the Manchester 1 Over the years the following candidates have been proposed as the ‘inventor of the telescope’: (1) from the Netherlands: Hans Lipperhey, Jacob Adriaensz Metius, Zacharias Jansen and Cornelis Drebbel, to which in this paper – just for the sake of argument – I will add the name ‘Lowys Lowyssen, geseyt Henricxen brilmakers’; (2) from Italy: Girolamo Fracastoro, Raffael Gualterotti, Giovanni Baptista Della Porta and Galileo Galilei; from (3) England: Roger Bacon, Leonard Digges and William Bourne (4) from Germany Jacobus Velser and Simon Marius; (5) from Spain: Juan Roget, and (6) from the Arabian world: Abul Hasan, also known as Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haith- am.
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