Posted on 01/06/2007 12:39:59 PM PST by blam
Posted on: Friday, 5 January 2007, 06:15 CST
400-Year-Old Telescopes Appear in the Strangest of Places
CHICAGO -- Like cell phones or the Internet in recent history, the telescope's introduction in the early 17th Century had a swift and lasting impact on the world. Telescopes revolutionized military strategy and within months showed the father of astronomy, Galileo Galilei, that Earth is not the center of the universe.
Until recently, scholars thought only 8 or 10 of these important early telescopes _ made between 1608 and 1650 of tightly rolled paper and crudely ground lenses _ had survived to the present day.
Then two historians on a visit to a museum in Berlin last fall had an "aha!" moment. One of the oldest known surviving telescopes at the German museum gave them an idea of places to look for other, as yet undiscovered examples.
Their insight apparently was correct. According to Marvin Bolt of Chicago's Adler Planetarium, he and his colleague found a previously unreported 1627 telescope in a Dresden museum storage room within 24 hours of their brainstorm. Less than a day later, they found a second, slightly earlier telescope that had lain unnoticed in the storage room of a museum in Kassel.
"This discovery is exciting, because it suggests further places to look for more old telescopes," said Bolt, who made the discovery with Michael Korey, a museum conservator in Germany.
Finding more early telescopes will help scientists and historians better understand who made them and how they evolved and improved over time, said Eugene Rudd, an emeritus University of Nebraska professor of physics who is a world authority on old telescopes.
"I've seen the photographs of the two Marvin has located in Germany, and they certainly have the characteristics of the very early ones," said Rudd. "I know of only eight telescopes that date before 1650 that still survive, so to find two more is extraordinary, a remarkable find."
Bolt is a technology historian at the Adler, which boasts the largest and finest collection of old scientific instruments in the Western Hemisphere, including an exquisite, leather-covered, trumpet-shaped device made in Italy around 1630.
Korey is a conservator at the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden. The museum has one of the world's oldest and most renowned collections of historic scientific instruments.
Through an American Association of Museums program sponsored by the U.S. State Department, Korey visited the Adler collection last summer, working in areas in which Bolt lacks expertise. Then, late in September, Bolt flew to Dresden to help Korey with his museum's collection of 18th Century and late-17th Century telescopes.
"I also wanted to visit some other museums that have the really old telescopes," Bolt said, "hoping I might learn some things that might tell me more about our old telescope. We know very little about it."
On Oct. 2, he and Korey visited Berlin's Decorative Arts Museum to see a well-known telescope dating to 1617. It had been part of a collection of 17th Century scientific instruments found in a finely crafted cabinet built for a royal family to display scientific instruments _ a kunstschrank.
Such cabinets were important status symbols in wealthy 17th Century households. The idea was that, by owning a kunstschrank and its contents, the owners showed they were learned and knowledgeable as well as generous sponsors of scientists and their work.
Seeing the 1617 telescope and the elaborate cabinet it came from, Bolt said a bell went off in his head. Probably there were other old cabinets scattered around Europe that nobody had ever looked into for old telescopes.
"In a decorative arts museum," he said, "curators aren't aware of the history of telescopes, and if they have one belonging to one of these cabinets, they regard it more as a beautiful object rather than an example of early technology.
"On the other hand, I don't think any technology historians had ever thought of a decorative arts museum as a place to hunt for early telescopes."
He and Korey excitedly began thinking about canvassing museums that might own the cabinets. That night, while attending the opera back in Dresden, Korey noticed a poster advertising the loan of a 17th Century kunstschrank from Dresden's own decorative arts museum to a Budapest museum.
The following morning Korey and Bolt visited the Dresden museum director who had loaned out the cabinet. Why yes, the director said, there was an artifact belonging to the cabinet that might have been some sort of looking device, but it was in such poor shape that it was not being displayed.
"In an early inventory of the cabinet's contents, it simply listed a `perspective glass,'" not a telescope, Korey said.
Under Bolt's guidance, a technician at Korey's museum took the paper-tube telescope apart and found the lenses wadded up in balls of paper inside. Bolt spent until 1:30 the next morning examining the glass and the grinding techniques to estimate their age.
"Michael knew the year of construction of the cabinet the telescope came out of, but he wouldn't tell me, as a sort of double-blind test of how accurate my age estimate might be," Bolt said. "I finally guessed the lenses dated to the 1620s or the 1630s."
The cabinet is positively dated to 1627.
At 5 a.m. that same morning, he and Korey boarded a train for a museum in Kassel devoted to scientific instruments, including many old telescopes, though none that were thought to date to pre-1650. It was Bolt's last full working day in Germany before returning home, and he wanted to study several unique telescopes there.
"About mid-afternoon, I mentioned what I had seen the night before and characteristics of really early ones," Bolt said. "One of the curators said he thought they had something like that in storage, and they took me there to show it to me.
"There it was on the shelf _ a beautiful early one, dating around the 1630s, in much better shape than the one in Dresden. It had decorative gold fleur de lis tooling on the leather covering of the barrel, suggesting it was Italian or French-made."
Bolt will return to Germany in 2007 to do more research on the old Kassel telescope, evaluating its lenses and investigating if it, too, originally was made to equip a kunstschrank.
Eager to see how technology evolved, science historians have missed important information by ignoring what roles the early telescopes played in society at the time they were built, especially as status symbols for the rich, Bolt said.
"Nobody has looked at them as cultural objects," he said. "We're going to continue to explore this genre, because it has the potential to offer so much information. If we find one associated with a well-known piece of furniture, it gives us a specific date for when it was made and possibly accurate information on who made it, where it was made and who owned it."
Such information on the known early telescopes is hard to come by, he said. Historians even disagree about how many are known to have survived. Some say there are 10, counting two telescopes in Florence thought to have been used by Galileo. Others don't count those two, believing they were made after more sophisticated lenses were developed in 1650.
"If you only have 8 or 10 examples of them," Bolt said, "it's not a large enough sample size to know all the characteristics of the early ones."
Nobody knows for certain who invented the telescope, but an obscure Dutch spectacle maker, Hans Lipperhey, is generally credited with demonstrating the first working model, at the court of Prince Maurice in the Netherlands in September 1608.
It was the middle of the savage Eighty Years' War. Maurice and his realm were in the Protestant camp that fought throughout Europe against Roman Catholic partisans led by Spain. Lipperhey's telescope caused a sensation, as Maurice and his courtiers saw it as a miraculous military tool to spy on enemy troops from long distances.
Unfortunately, Maurice talked so freely about the astounding new technology that the Spanish found somebody to build working telescopes almost immediately. Lipperhey never got the royal patent he had been seeking.
"The telescope is one of those revolutionary ideas that spread like wildfire," said Bolt. "Just months after Lipperhey showed off his device, you could buy telescopes in Paris."
Early that same year, Galileo began building his own telescopes after having read descriptions. By the end of 1609, he had pointed them into the night skies and discovered that other planets had orbiting moons. That profoundly shattering news would eventually tear apart scientific and theological dogma holding that the rest of the universe rotated around Earth. Humans began to see they live in a tiny corner of a vast cosmos rather than at the center of things.
Bolt and Korey are preparing a paper for academic publication on their discovery. During his 2007 visit to Germany, Bolt said, he and Korey will search out more kunstschrank cabinets in hopes of finding telescopes.
"We feel there is a good chance we may find some more in the next couple of years," said Bolt.
I found an old pickle jar in my cabinet.
Yeah, I don't think I want to go digging into the far corners of my cabinets for fear of what I'd find.
I've found $10 bucks before in a candy tin from 1988. My theory was that I had placed the ten there in case I needed it for a rainy day. I' never had a rainy day.
I don't I want to go digging into the far corners of my cabinets for fear of what would find me...
I'm really make a leap here, but here goes:
A great deal of the work in the field of history, throughout the 20th century, was intended to buttress the philosophy of Karl Marx. Read about empires, colonial experiences, military ventures, or economic influences, and you're looking at distilled Marxism, most likely. The fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and political science are redolent with Marxist ideology.
If enough serious historians actually look at these fields with fresh eyes, and no presumptions about "classes, hegemony, oppression, racism, and dialectics" then the world is apt to experience a Renaissance in the soft sciences. I think it will happen within a few decades, and I think it will be trans-formative.
The truth is often right in front of us, but sometimes we only see what we expect to see. Until a light dawns.
pong
PING
I'm glad they found these telescopes, now we can properly map the moon....
Some folks here on FR are still of that "at the center of things" persuasion...
You might be right.
But I think you are overly optimistic. The roots of Marxism go deep and are tightly tangled in the masonry of our institutions of higher learning.
BUMP!
One of my friends in MA has a 16" Dobsonian -- but his is mostly plywood. It's quite a beast to haul around.
Now I know why he was so happy to invite me (an extra pair of hands) over for viewing sessions... '-}
16" is a lot of light-gathering power, though. Once, he pointed his at the moon -- and the light shining though the eyepiece onto his face looked as bright as a flashlight!
I anticipate that many more of these will be found in other kunstschranks in other museums.
You've shown me no reason to do so... ;-)
I saw an article by a guy that used carbon fiber based tubes and a base made from mostly honeycomb material to make a fairly light weight scope. Don't remember the size.
The old scopes mentioned here are simple refractors. It would table Newton to recognize the prismatic effect of the edges of the lenses, and loss of true color.
I got a some filters and the Orion fanny pack for Christmas.
I had one night of worthwhile viewing since, and none predicted for the next week by the NWS.
I also made the one on the left here....
Yeah, that's a Dobsonian mount. It might well be made of plywood too.
Nothin' I hate worse than a cluttered kunstschrank.
Um, where oh where to look for centuries old telescopes? I've got it!
In museums! Brilliant!
Yes, that's a Dobsonian. The truss design reduces the weight and the bulk. You can break this unit down into three pieces, with poles, and put it in the back of a small car. I have an 8" Schmidt telescope and a 120mm refractor, but hanker for a 16" reflector. I saw M51 spiral galaxy through a 16" and could make out the spiral arms. Fantastic.
Amen.
Wasn't it a Dutchman who made the first microscope?
I've got a book on building large appature Dobsonians, but would prefer to have someone looking over my shoulder along the way. I'm not all that mechanical. Commercial large appatures scopes are horrifically expensive. The Meade Lightbridge is probably the most economical.
Saying that we live in a "corner" is every bit as unscientific as saying that we live at the "center," as it implies that the true center is to be elsewhere.
And who is to say that our abode isn't central in importance even though centrality in location is meaningless? If we are indeed the only place where intelligent life exists, as we are so far as we know, I would certainly say the Earth is central in importance.
All of those mass production Dobs are made of particle board, which tends to be even heavier (though not stronger) than plywood. (Note: In my experience, particle board tends to be stiffer but not as strong as plywood) The scopes linked in post #20 are cardboard (SonoTube) tubes and plywood Dobsonian mounts.
The left hand one is a 14.5" f5.5 on an equatorial platform, and the one on the right is an 18" f4.5. Mine is on the left. My buddy doesn't usually use an equatorial platform because he likes to use digital setting circles.
That's me in the photo, taken at dawn at Redrock Inyokern Road in the Mojave Desert, winter 2000-2001.
According to this page...
"Sometime about the year 1590, two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans started experimenting with these lenses. They put several lenses in a tube and made a very important discovery. The object near the end of the tube appeared to be greatly enlarged, much larger than any simple magnifying glass could achieve by itself! They had just invented the compound microscope (which is a microscope that uses two or more lenses)."
Okay, okay, OKAY!!! I know I'm not good at putting my things away. My wife complains to me all the time. Sheesh, I don't need the whole world talking about it.
Man, you leave one stinkin' old telescope lying around . . .
They'd row out to escort such ships in to shore so they could avoid brigands who lived in the fens and swamps in the region.
Dutch independence had occurred about 1581. Immediately following this part of the world had a "Golden Age" while fighting what is known as the 80 years war (which started earlier than 1581 in fact).
AFAIK, my intro to Von L. was Paul De Kruif's The Microbe Hunters.
I do know that I built my own Van Leeuwenhoek-style microscope when I was 8 or 9 years old. I used a tongue depressor in which I glued the lens that I had broken out of a penlight bulb. It was about 100X, and I clearly remember the awe I felt when I viewed my first specimen (a fly's leg) with it! It must have really impressed me, because I wound up spending much of my career with my nose between microscope eyepieces...
For me, a trip into the attic spaces would be considered 'on safari'.
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I give the Creator far more credit for efficiency than that...
bump
Put some ointment on there and try not to scratch it and it'll probably clear up in a couple of days.
Did the Vikings make a telescope?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/702478.stm
World's oldest telescope?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/380186.stm
Thanks! You made my day with your comment! Now I can sleep tonight knowing that we have put technology to work to mitigate my concerns about the quality of moon mapping.
Cool! Bring one of these puppies to a star party, and you'll get an F-5 tornado.
Nevermind. It was really stupid of me to ask you for the price -- when I'm sitting here connected to the Internet. :-{
Looks like the Mead Lightbridge 16" Dob runs about $2K -- shipping included.
Excellent finds by Bolt, Korey and Blam.
I know a little bit about this, my room mate has a 8 inch telescope. When looking at the moon, you definitely want to be using neutral density filters to cut down on the light other wise it will burn your eyes out.
Hey TXnMA,
I've got a 10" Meade Dob with some extra stuff that I'd let go reasonable. If you're interested, Freepmail me.
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