Hans Lippershey

Hans Lippershey is generally credited with the first patent application for a telescope, the instrument that transformed astronomy within eighteen months of its appearance. Born in Wesel in Germany around 1570, he moved to Middelburg in the Dutch province of Zeeland, became a citizen in 1602, and worked as a spectacle-maker. On 25 September 1608 he applied to the States General of the Netherlands for a thirty-year patent on a device for seeing things far away as if they were nearby, demonstrating it from a tower in The Hague to a delegation that included Maurice of Nassau and a Spanish negotiator. It used a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece and magnified perhaps three times. The patent was refused. Two other claimants appeared almost immediately — Jacob Metius of Alkmaar, who applied weeks later, and Sacharias Jansen, also of Middelburg — and the authorities concluded that the device was too easy to copy to be protected. They paid Lippershey well to build several binocular versions for the government, which had an obvious military interest in it. Who was genuinely first is unresolved and probably unresolvable. A version of the story has children in his shop playing with lenses and noticing that a distant weathervane appeared enlarged. The news spread across Europe within months. Thomas Harriot in England drew the Moon through one in July 1609, and Galileo Galilei, hearing a description in Venice, built his own and improved it to about twenty times magnification, turning a commercial novelty into a scientific instrument. Lippershey continued as a lens grinder and died in Middelburg in 1619. A crater on the Moon carries his name.

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