October 2nd 1608 may not have been the real date of the telescope invention

Oct 2, 2008 14:33 GMT  ·  By

Although some scientists celebrate 400 years since the telescope was first invented, today, others prefer to wait until 2009, the officially declared International Year of Astronomy. This further proves the controversy on the exact date of the creation of the device.

According to some experts, the first real telescope emerged in the Netherlands in the fall of 1608 and its inventor, supposedly Jacob Metius – or Jacobus (sometimes called James) received a small award from The Hague government for the tool that was “seeing faraway things as though nearby”, a tube containing a concave and a convex lens which magnified an object three or four times. Hans Lippershey (sometimes spelled Lipperhey, born in Germany) was then asked to duplicate the device and transform it into a binocular and thus he is sometimes credited as the inventor of the telescope. Allegedly, Lippershey had applied for a patent for his “Dutch perspective glass” a few weeks before Metius, but it was not granted.

Even more, other claims point to a neighbor of Lippershey's, a fellow optician by the name of Zacharias Janssen, as the real inventor of the device. In any case, this one is also believed to be the inventor of the first compound microscope. Unfortunately, there is no solid piece of evidence for either of his inventions, as there isn't any for the rest of the two credited for the telescope's creation. Anyway, all of them were Dutch, at least at the time of the telescope's patent applications' submissions, although Lippershey filled his rejected one in Belgium. This is how Dutch people came to commemorate the invention of the “telescoop” filled by a German in Belgium. The glory of the celebrations were somewhat shadowed by Italy's successful attempt of submitting a resolution to the United Nations, in which 2009 is proclaimed the Year of Astronomy, but the Netherlands will attend the event nevertheless.