Astronomy’s controversial awakening
Marnie was a little peeved. As the coordinator of our 2008 Stargazer I tour, of the great European centres of astronomy history, she had bigger things on her mind than a missing bike, but nevertheless the irritation showed. You would think that with nearly 1000 bicycles for hire on this little island—almost three per head of the population—there would have been plenty to go around. But, on this lovely September afternoon, when a leisurely 4.5-kilometre ride from one end of the island to the other was such an inviting prospect, they were at a premium. And Marnie’s had been pinched. Worse, it had been pinched by one of the participants in the tour. And, of course, the customer is always right . . .
You would be forgiven for thinking that the title of this chapter promises a titillating exploration of the misdemeanours of the Stargazer tour’s participants. After all, twenty-odd lively people a long way from home can get up to all sorts of tricks. But, even allowing for the old maxim of ‘What goes on tour stays on tour,’ I’m afraid the mix-up with bike hire was about as spicy as it got. Rather, this chapter has a somewhat wider aim. For me, the notion of stargazers behaving badly brings to mind lots of real episodes from a lifetime spent in the trade. One of the free extras that come with a career in national observatories is that you interact with a large and representative cross-section of the professional astronomical community, as its members travel from their various learned institutions to use your facility’s telescopes. It provides a unique opportunity to observe the observers, so to speak. And it soon becomes clear that astronomers, being human, are capable of all kinds of behaviour—including the bad kind.
Without mentioning any names (for many of these people are still working scientists), I could tell you about high spirits leading to irreplaceable glass photographic plates being sat on and broken. And late-night parties leading to large telescopes equipped with delicate and expensive instruments being rained on, when the weather changed. And blood-curdling expletives being hurled about when dome interior lights were switched on at the wrong time, and even worse language when sensitive instruments were switched off at the wrong time. Some astronomers have torn pages out of log-books so the next group of observers using the telescope wouldn’t know where it had been pointing and therefore be able to ‘steal’ their target objects. Other astronomers seem to have been more interested in stealing their colleagues’ ideas—or, occasionally, their spouse. And, lest I should be accused of throwing stones in glass houses, I freely admit that one of the people who dropped snowballs onto passers-by from the tower of Strasbourg Cathedral during a wintry 1980s astronomy conference was me. Disgraceful.
All sorts of considerations, mostly legal, prevent any further exploration of these particular issues—at least for a few decades. However, they really only scratch the surface. Astronomers have been exhibiting bad behaviour of one sort or another for centuries, and many significant historical events have been characterised by less-than-wholesome undercurrents. Just a few of them are revealed in this chapter.
Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, our doughty tour coordinator turned the unexpected loss of her bicycle into a highlight, relaxing on the warm grass and trying to imagine what that same spot would have been like 400 and more years earlier. The place where she lay, alongside the rest of us who weren’t cycling, was the epicentre of the island’s claim to fame. This place was Stjerneborg, the Castle of the Stars, an observatory built by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1586 on the fabled Danish island of Hven. The facts that the island is these days called Ven and since 1660 has belonged to Sweden didn’t really seem to matter on that balmy autumn day. Nothing could change the lasting impression that this was one of the most enchanting places in the world.
A PRODUCT OF HIS TIME . . .
The venerable Tycho Brahe was the greatest observational astronomer of the pre-telescopic age—truly the Lord of the Stars. Known to posterity by the Latinised version of his first name (Tyge), adopted while he was a student, he lived on the eve of the telescope’s emergence from obscurity in the early 1600s. Born of noble Danish parents in 1546 (and, by coincidence, sharing a birthday with your humble author), Tycho was brought up in rather unusual circumstances. In a display of behaviour that would be considered pretty bad by today’s standards, his aunt and uncle stole him from his parents when he was a baby and raised him as their own son. Sixteenth-century Denmark was more tolerant of such events than we are, however, and his natural parents simply took it in their stride, shrugged their shoulders and got on with producing more kids.
Tycho is best remembered for his amazingly accurate observations of the positions of planets and stars made in the 1580s and 1590s with advanced sighting instruments of his own design. Most of these were located at his two observatories on that tiny island in the Øresund, the strait separating modern-day Sweden and Denmark. Uraniborg, the Castle of Urania, came first, completed in 1580. It also served as Tycho’s home and laboratory, but nothing remains of it today save its modest outline amid the restored splendour of the lord’s gardens. A few metres away is Stjerneborg, completed in 1586 and sunk into the ground to provide better stability for Tycho’s observations than the rickety wooden platforms of Uraniborg. It has fared rather better, and there are still fragments of the foundations of his instruments to be seen. Stjerneborg now forms the backdrop of an audio-visual diorama for visitors, incorporating these important remnants. The exquisitely accurate measurements made in Tycho’s observatories eventually led to the laws of planetary motion established by his former student Johannes Kepler, who was, without doubt, the greatest mathematician of his day; his laws are still taught as the basis of orbital dynamics.
Besides being an astronomer of formidable skill, Tycho was also the first modern-style director of a scientific institution. He was accomplished in what would today be called project management, organising his financial and human resources to maintain Renaissance Europe’s foremost research centre. But he is also remembered for his arrogance and his fiery temper, and it was these aspects of his personality that got him into all sorts of trouble in the fateful December of 1566.
Tycho was a twenty-year-old university student at the time, and, in common with all respectable astronomers of his day, was also a keen exponent of astrology. While today we know that the art of divining personal insights from the stars has no basis in fact—even if some do find it irresistibly fascinating—in Tycho’s era it was taken seriously. Indeed, while the word ‘astronomy’ is derived from the Greek for ‘numbering the stars’, ‘astrology’ comes from ‘words about the stars’. In the sixteenth century those meanings were nearer to the surface than they are today.
The late Victor E. Thoren (one of the twentieth century’s most respected scholars of Tycho’s life and work) suggested that it was an erroneous astrological prediction that led to the unfortunate duel in which Tycho lost most of his nose. It seems the sequence of events began with Tycho’s deep and meaningful deliberations on the astrological significance of a lunar eclipse on 28 October 1566, an event in which the Moon passed through the shadow of the Earth. He decided it foretold the death of Süleyman the Magnificent, the 70-year-old sultan of the Ottoman Empire. To be honest, that would have seemed like a pretty safe bet for any would-be astrologer, since living to the age of 70 was a truly remarkable achievement by the standards of the day. So Tycho broadcast his prediction widely.
Unfortunately, it soon emerged that Süleyman had died several weeks before the eclipse, and Tycho was ribbed mercilessly over the blunder. Chief among his critics was Manderup Parsberg, a fellow student and distant relative of the young nobleman. According to Thoren’s interpretation, several days of intermittent bickering between these two eventually flared into something more serious on 29 December. Rather inconveniently, the matter came to a head at a dinner party in, of all places, the house of a professor of theology. No doubt the feisty Tycho reckoned that a duel would finish this acrimonious debate once and for all. In the event, however, he was the one who almost got finished.
The contest was very short and seems to have been stopped through the intervention of the other guests—understandably put out by this indecorous interruption to their dinner. (Probably, someone got a bit of nose in their soup. That would certainly be off-putting at a dinner party.) Tycho, covered in blood, may not at first have realised just how lucky he had been. The blow that had sliced open his forehead and removed the bridge of his nose had missed his eyes by millimetres. It is truly remarkable that the person who was destined to become the most accomplished naked-eye astronomer in history was spared by a whisker from losing his sight altogether.
The prosthetic noses that Tycho developed later in life are well documented. There was a copper one for weekdays and a silver-and-gold-alloy model for Sundays—and he was never without the jar of ointment he used to stick them on with. Pity help anyone who got in the way when he sneezed. But while the great astronomer carried the disfigurement of his youthful bad behaviour to his deathbed, there is evidence that he bore no grudge against Parsberg. That is surely an illuminating insight into his character.
As he grew older, Tycho matured into a great scholar, an erudite man whose company was sought by monarchs and nobles as well as by his fellow scientists. But there is one other aspect of Tycho’s life that calls his behaviour into question, and again it was the consequence of his high station in life, as well as of the era in which he lived. It seems that, for all his being a generous teacher and devoted husband and father, he rode roughshod over the peasants of Hven. He was, in fact, within his rights to make significant demands on the islanders, as Hven had been gifted to him, in May 1576, by his patron, Good King Fred—Frederick II of Denmark and Norway—and a proportion of their labour was due to Tycho as their feudal lord. The trouble was, the islanders had previously considered themselves to be freeholders in their own right and strongly resented the dues they were forced to pay to their new landlord. It’s easy to imagine the kinds of disputes that this would have caused.
There is some evidence that Tycho overstepped the mark in his treatment of the peasants. In 1597, when his enterprise on Hven was coming to an end because of the meddling of hostile courtiers close to the new king, Christian IV, strident accusations of ill-treatment were brought against him by the islanders. Indeed, the island’s pastor served a gaol sentence on Tycho’s behalf.
What is certain is that when Tycho’s affairs on Hven were finally wound up, following his death in exile, in 1601, the peasants quickly took matters into their own hands. They wreaked their revenge on his bad behaviour in the shape of bricks and stones, which they spirited away to their own homes. Within a few short decades, what had once been the greatest observatory in the world had virtually disappeared.
During the last year of Tycho’s life, when he was in the imperial city of Prague, he worked closely with the youthful Johannes Kepler. Recognising Kepler’s brilliance, Tycho confided closely in him, but the pair also quarrelled ferociously over minor issues. Indeed, Kepler has been posthumously accused—probably baselessly—of trying to murder his great teacher. But today they are reconciled, and their effigies stand side by side at the busy intersection of 
ova and Keplerova in downtown Prague. Needless to say, when the Stargazer II tour visited Prague in 2010, those imposing statues provided the perfect backdrop for a group photo.
. . . AND A PRODUCT OF A VERY DIFFERENT TIME
One of the characteristics of our astronomy tours, particularly in Europe, is that there’s so much of interest that participants often find themselves switching between widely differing historical periods when travelling from one destination to the next. Thus, the tours take quite unexpected twists and turns. In a similar vein, I’d now like to take you on a detour through a very different era of European history, a detour that nevertheless has links with Tycho’s time.
Fast-forward nearly 350 years from Tycho’s death and we find another stargazer putting on a display of bad behaviour related to the times in which he lived. But if we can be amused by Tycho’s youthful incompetence with a broadsword, it’s impossible to be anything but serious about the context in which this astronomer conducted his work.
Ernst Zinner was a German astronomer who lived through the Nazi period. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, he was 47 years old and director of the Remeis Observatory, at Bamberg in southern Germany. He was also a professor of astronomy in Munich. As a highprofile academic living and working in the heartland of Nazi fanaticism, Zinner came under pressure to join the Party and—to give him some credit—he refused. However, his refusal seems to have had more to do with snobbery than a distaste for the Party’s totalitarian ideals. Like many of his fellows in the privileged world of academia, he regarded the Party’s membership as uncultivated and working class.
Scrutiny by Party officials followed, and, although he was described as ‘unfriendly and arrogant’, he was not identified as an enemy of the state. He seems, therefore, to have had an adequate working relationship with the Nazi regime, and it has been suggested by the US historian Robert S. Westman that this was because his ideals broadly coincided with theirs: the superiority of the German race, the need for a Greater Germany, the idea of war as the epitome of male virtue, the need for authoritarian government and so on. Most disturbingly, when the 1937 Four Year Plan for the universities referred to ‘cleansing German higher education from liberalist and materialistic bonds’, Zinner seems to have been in accord. The dark clouds of the Holocaust were already clear on the horizon.
The evidence for Zinner’s sympathies comes from his own work. His speciality was the study of variable stars—whose brightness changes in a systematic way—but he was also a prolific writer on the history of astronomy, and in this it is possible to identify not just bad behaviour but an attempt to rewrite history to match Nazi ideals. In 1943—exactly 400 years after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ epoch-making On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres had appeared—Zinner published a book entitled The Origins and Dissemination of the Copernican Doctrine. In this volume he gathered together a vast archive of biographical and other data on obscure individuals and their roles in promulgating the Copernican theory of the Solar System, which places the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre. No doubt it is the archive that gives the book its enduring value (it was republished in 1988), but what is more relevant to us is the accompanying text.
Zinner makes an outright attempt to turn the Copernican model into a German creation. Wherever possible he seeks a Germanic link with the events surrounding the development of Copernicus’ Sun-centred model and its subsequent dispersion into the world of learning. Copernicus himself is turned into a German rather than a Pole by dint of dubious genealogical and geographical argument. More surprisingly, Tycho Brahe is transformed into a kind of Germanised Dane. It is true that Tycho spent a significant amount of time in Germany as a young man—indeed, his fateful duel was fought in Rostock—but it is hard to imagine him considering himself to be anything other than a Danish nobleman.
Tycho, in fact, was not a supporter of the Copernican theory, preferring his own hybrid model of the Solar System, in which the planets orbit the Sun, which in turn orbits the Earth. This does not seem to have worried Zinner, however. More of a problem for him was the company that Tycho kept. One of Tycho’s colleagues late in his life was a Prague astronomer and mathematician called David Gans—a Jew. Gans held the view that natural sciences such as astronomy could have a unifying effect for Jews and Christians, bringing together their theologies in a beneficial manner. This was in line with Tycho’s own thinking, and the two men spent much time together around the turn of the seventeenth century discussing the astronomy and astronomers of the past. References to this important figure in Tycho’s life can be found in one of Zinner’s earlier publications, but by the time his Origins and Dissemination was published—meticulously researched though it was—Gans had conveniently disappeared. Tycho’s circle had been sanitised to meet the expectations of a readership looking for pure Aryan credentials.
No doubt one could argue that this kind of distortion was as much an effort at self-preservation as support for the Third Reich. It cannot have been easy for educated people to survive in Nazi Germany. And perhaps the fact that Zinner nowhere embarks on overtly anti-Semitic rhetoric in his book supports that view. However, there is other evidence from as early as 1931 of racist tendencies in Zinner’s thinking. Having compared the improvements in stellar position measurements made by individuals whom he could identify as Germanic in origin with an earlier decline in their Greek equivalents, he suggests the foundation of an institute to investigate national tendencies in science and culture. It is a curious idea with unpleasant undertones.
After the Second World War, Ernst Zinner continued his work almost as if nothing had happened. He retired from his position at Bamberg in 1953 but continued his interest in rare astronomical literature until his death, in 1970. Most of his own 5000-strong collection of books was sold to the California State University at San Diego in 1967.
What are we to say about this stargazer behaving badly? That, compared with the events surrounding him, his behaviour was mild? Certainly, against the broad backdrop of Nazi oppression, Zinner hardly rates a raised eyebrow. And from our vantage point in the 21st century it is easy to be judgemental. But one would like to think that a true and dedicated astronomer might have done better. Much better.
WHO INVENTED THE TELESCOPE?
Now, back to the seventeenth century, and to an episode that is still surrounded by mystery and intrigue—and bad behaviour. The invention of the telescope was arguably the single most important event in the entire history of astronomy. For the first time, one of the human senses was extended to discover objects that had previously been invisible. It instantly transformed the study of the heavens from simple join-the-dots measurement to a dawning understanding of what those dots actually stood for. At a stroke it gave new weight to Copernicus’ Sun-centred theory of the Solar System, beginning an era in which theories about our environment in space could be built on an ever-increasing scale. Who could have guessed that those ideas would one day lead to the supremely powerful Big Bang model of the Universe, revered by today’s scientists and philosophers?
The telescope first came to prominence in the hands of Florentine patrician Galileo Galilei, who, at the time, was far from his native Florence, teaching mathematics in the University of Padua, near Venice. You have only to read a modern translation of his little book The Starry Messenger, of 1610, to sense the trembling excitement with which he plucked discovery after discovery from the sky with his new gadget. Craters and mountains on the Moon, stars rather than, well, milk coagulating in the Milky Way and—most dramatically—Jupiter’s brilliant speck revealed as a disc with four moons orbiting around it. Truly, this was the dawn of modern astronomy.
Contrary to popular belief, however, Galileo wasn’t the inventor of the telescope. He tells us in The Starry Messenger that he first heard a rumour about a Dutch perspicillum (spyglass) sometime around May 1609. The story of how Galileo set about understanding this device without actually having seen it and then went on to build a succession of steadily improving versions is the stuff of legend. Without question, the startling discoveries he made resulted directly from those efforts. But invent the telescope he did not.
So who did? It’s a great question, and the short answer is that no one knows, exactly. What we do know is that truly extraordinary events surrounded the emergence of the telescope and they make for a remarkable story. Even today’s historical research on the subject has so many twists and turns that it’s worth a little scene-setting before we unpick the details.
The first name associated with the telescope’s debut on the world stage is that of Hans Lipperhey (commonly spelled Lippershey), a humble spectacle-maker, who petitioned the government of the fledgling Dutch republic for a patent on the invention late in September 1608. His timing was perfect, coinciding with tense diplomatic negotiations between the Dutch and the Spanish, who had been at war since 1568. But, in a farcical turn of events, two other individuals appeared within three weeks asking for similar patents, so it is questionable whether Lipperhey was the true originator of the telescope.
Many of the contemporary documents that refer to these bizarre proceedings were uncovered early in the twentieth century by another Dutchman, Cornelis de Waard, and presented, together with related evidence, in his Invention of the Telescope, published in The Hague in 1906. It was in assembling and translating those original sources for a wider readership that the modern historian Albert Van Helden performed perhaps the greater service to today’s scholars. He wrote a detailed analysis of their contents in a comprehensive work also entitled ‘The Invention of the Telescope’, published as a complete issue of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, in 1977. This study has become the yardstick against which all subsequent commentaries on the origin of the telescope have been judged. It should not be assumed, though, that Van Helden solved all the problems. Indeed, he made no claim to have done so. The evidence is a maze of contradictory statements and reports, often with well-known historical names intermingled with shadowy figures in confusing circumstances. It’s a very difficult research area.
Then, into this minefield stepped another brave author, the late M. Barlow Pepin, who, in 2004, produced a little book with the intriguing title of The Emergence of the Telescope: Janssen, Lipperhey, and the Unknown Man. His stated purpose was to take a ‘fresh look’ at the circumstances under which the telescope had arrived on the scene. While no significant new evidence had come to light since Van Helden’s epic work, Pepin did manage to draw together some previously unrecognised threads, and his book is a useful contribution to the scholarly literature. To be honest, I wish I’d had a copy a few years before, when I embarked on my own foray into this morass for Stargazer: The Life and Times of the Telescope. The conclusion Pepin arrived at is not too different from de Waard’s of a century earlier, although it is a lot more entertainingly presented. The telescope was perfected not by Lipperhey, said Pepin, but by one Sacharias Janssen, a spectacle-maker, peddler and small-time crook, who secretly presented an example to the authorities shortly before Lipperhey got around to it. It was a classic example of spectacle-makers behaving badly.
Several authors, including Van Helden, have asked another intriguing question: ‘Did the telescope have a history before 1608?’ Perhaps there was ancient knowledge of the working principles of the telescope that was lost in the mists of time, or maybe more-recent experiments by optically minded natural philosophers predated the appearance of the Dutchmen’s telescope in the historical record. A few of the many claims to such precursors have some credibility, and one in particular stands out, in a book with the wonderful title Natural Magic, first published in 1589, and written by an Italian optician called Giovanbaptista Della Porta. A throwaway line about the use of lenses to correct poor eyesight quickens the pulse of anyone wishing to place the invention of the telescope before the early seventeenth century. Specifically, Della Porta refers to the use of convex lenses (which are thicker in the middle than around the edge) and concave lenses (which are the other way around):
With a Concave you shall see small things afar off, very clearly; with a Convex, things neerer to be greater, but more obscurely: if you know how to fit them both together, you shall see both things afar off, and things neer hand, both greater and clearly.
Remarkably, when the telescope did finally make its undisputed first appearance, it was in a form that took a convex and a concave lens and ‘fit them both together’ at opposite ends of a tube. This makes what is called a Galilean telescope, in homage to its great champion, and, incidentally, is still found today in the guise of ordinary opera glasses.
So, did Della Porta know the secret of the Galilean telescope in the 1580s? Maybe he did, although it is clear from the context of the quote that he is really referring to the improvement of defective vision rather than a telescope in the modern sense of the word. Nevertheless, Van Helden has suggested that Della Porta did, indeed, succeed in making a weak Galilean telescope but that he didn’t perceive its wider possibilities as a device for magnifying distant objects.
Credibility is lent to this idea by the fact that, on 28 August 1609 (by which time Lipperhey’s Dutch spyglass of 1608 had become well known), Della Porta wrote to a noble friend, telling him that he’d seen one of these supposedly new instruments. ‘It is a hoax,’ he said, ‘and is taken from the ninth book of my On Refraction.’ By ‘hoax’, we can perhaps infer that Della Porta meant there was nothing new in the Dutch invention, for hadn’t he written about it himself twenty years previously? In fact, Della Porta was getting his own books confused, since On Refraction (1593) doesn’t mention the combination of lenses, whereas, as we have seen, Natural Magic does. I guess when you’re a sixteenth-century genius you might have some excuse for mixing up your references. Notwithstanding that slip, the letter does seem to support a case for the Galilean telescope having originated in Italy, a theme to which we shall return.
The one thing that casts doubt on the effectiveness of this and other sixteenth-century supposed telescope-like devices is that they were not picked up for widespread use as military or scientific instruments, as they certainly were in 1608 (very quickly, in fact—the news spread like wildfire throughout the following year). In particular, the greatest scientist in Europe in the late sixteenth century—Tycho Brahe—seems to have been completely unaware of them. Had he heard of a telescope in any form, he, more than anyone, would have checked it out and would have either made one or written about it. But he did neither.
SEPTEMBER 1608
Six years and eleven months after Tycho’s death, the telescope was a reality. That much is historical fact. We know, from a number of original documents that have survived the ravages of time (and a few that remain only as copies, thanks to the attentions of the Luftwaffe in 1940), that sometime around Saturday 27 September 1608 a spectacle-maker turned up in The Hague carrying a telescope and a letter of introduction written two days earlier.
As it happens, that was quite a weekend in Dutch history. With both sides weary of conflict after 40 years, the Dutch and the Spanish had taken tentative steps towards a truce, and peace negotiations had been in progress in The Hague throughout September. But things had not gone well, and on the last day of the month the commander-in-chief of the Spanish forces in the southern Netherlands—a nobleman by the name of Ambrogio Spinola—left The Hague with the talks in deadlock.
Spinola’s opposite number on the Dutch side was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Prince Maurice of Nassau. (Not to be confused with its better-known namesake in the Bahamas, Nassau in present-day Germany was then a principality of the Holy Roman Empire.) Maurice was a seriously talented man, and pretty formidable in appearance, if contemporary portraits are anything to go by. Not only was he commander-in-chief, but he was also the Stadtholder (leader) of the United Provinces government, an assembly known as the States General. This federal parliament was made up of representatives of the seven provinces of the Dutch republic. On or around 27 September, the delegate in The Hague from the province of Zeeland received from home, two days’ journey away, a strange letter from his fellow councillors. Dated 25 September, the letter explained that
the bearer of this [letter] . . . claims to have a certain device, by means of which all things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby, by looking through glasses which he claims to be a new invention, [and he] would like to communicate the same to His Excellency [Prince Maurice].
That the parliamentary recipient of the letter did, indeed, introduce the bearer of the letter to Prince Maurice is borne out by other contemporary documents. The Hague was full of diplomatic emissaries from other nations, all with a vested interest in the peace process, and at least one of them wrote home to tell of a humble spectacle-maker who had been ushered in to the prince’s presence carrying a remarkable tube with a glass lens at each end. It was called ‘the instrument for seeing far’, for the word that became ‘telescope’ in English was not coined until three and a half years later, when an exclusive group of Italian and Greek intellectuals held a banquet to honour Galileo and his astronomical discoveries.
In order to test the instrument, Prince Maurice climbed the tower of his residence in the grounds of the Binnenhof—the imposing thirteenth-century building that was then the seat of the States General and remains its ceremonial home today. From there, we are told, he could clearly see through the instrument the clock of Delft and the windows of the church of Leiden, respectively one and a half and three and a half hours’ journey away. The enormous military potential of the device was not lost on the Stadtholder, and he was very impressed: so much so that within a day or two—or perhaps even at the same time—he showed it to the enemy commander, Marquis Spinola. We don’t know whether that was a misguided ploy or some sort of diplomatic etiquette—or maybe Prince Maurice just wanted to deliver a gloating ‘look what we’ve got’ to his opposite number. Whatever the reason, by the time the commander-in-chief of the enemy forces left The Hague, on 30 September, he had not only held the new surveillance device in his hands but taken a look through it. No doubt he was impressed, too.
On the following Thursday, 2 October, the spectacle-maker presented himself at the Binnenhof to be interviewed by the members of the States General, who were keen to see the marvellous new invention for themselves. He asked them to grant him a patent for 30 years, during which time no one else would be permitted to make telescopes. Or, if they preferred, he’d be quite happy with a yearly pension, in return for which he would make telescopes solely for the state. He didn’t really mind which.
The minutes of that interview give us the identity of the man for the first time, since the councillors’ letter of 25 September didn’t actually mention his name. He was, as we have seen, Hans Lipperhey, a German-born spectacle-maker who lived in the town of Middelburg, in Zeeland—and he was the first person to be identified with a verifiable working telescope. He didn’t get his patent, but he was paid handsomely to make three binocular versions of the telescope, the last of which he delivered on 13 February 1609. Whether or not he invented the telescope itself, Lipperhey can safely be hailed as the inventor of binoculars. And that was a task so difficult that over the next two centuries only a handful of instrument-builders even attempted it.
Hans Lipperhey’s moment of glory as the inventor of the telescope lasted little more than two weeks. News of his wonderful device spread quickly through the provinces of the Netherlands and evidently caused consternation in at least two Dutch households when it reached them.
On Friday, 17 October, a letter arrived at The Hague addressed to the States General from an instrument-maker in Alkmaar, in the northern part of the Netherlands, a man named Jacob Adriaenszoon but more commonly known as Jacob Metius. He was a much more imposing character than the humble Lipperhey. His father, Adriaen, was a former burgomaster of Alkmaar, and his brother, another Adriaen, was a professor of mathematics and astronomy, who had studied with none other than Tycho Brahe. (Such was the extent of Tycho’s influence throughout Europe at the time.) The letter was a long, rambling missive announcing Metius’ accidental discovery of the principle of the telescope after a couple of years of intensive study and experimentation. It went on to say that Metius had heard of the invention of the spectacle-maker of Middelburg and that his own prototype instrument had been tested and was at least as good as that one, so he, too, deserved a patent on the invention, because of his own ‘ingenuity, great labour and care (through God’s blessings)’.
Metius’ petition was, like Lipperhey’s a fortnight earlier, duly noted in the States General’s minute book, with a comment that Metius would be granted modest funding and ‘admonished to work further in order to bring his invention to greater perfection, at which time a decision will be made on his patent in the proper manner’. With hindsight, this seems rather generous of the States General.
Hardly was the ink dry in their minute book than yet another claim turned up. It may even have arrived before Metius’ petition, although was not minuted then. Written on 14 October, this was a letter from the same councillors of Zeeland who had provided Lipperhey’s original letter of recommendation. In Middelburg, they said, there were now others who knew the art of seeing far things and places as if nearby. In particular, there was a young man who had demonstrated a similar instrument to Lipperhey’s. What would the honourable gentlemen like them to do about him? If there was any doubt left in the minds of the parliamentarians in The Hague that this invention was already too widely known to be patented it must have been dispelled altogether by this news.
With those three players assembled on the stage of history, the scene was set for the true details of the telescope’s origin to disappear amid the babble of conflicting contemporary records. Who first made a telescope? Lipperhey? Metius? Or the ‘young man’ of Middelburg? And who was that last young rascal, anyway?
In fact, ‘rascal’ is probably an appropriate epithet. Since 1656, when his association with the first telescope was confirmed by the recollections of several locals who had known him, most scholars have taken the young man to be Sacharias Janssen, a spectacle-maker who would have been about twenty years old in 1608. But it was Cornelis de Waard, in the early twentieth century, who uncovered most of what we know about him. And it makes pretty interesting reading.
As well as following the family trade of spectacle-making, Janssen also peddled his wares throughout Europe. He may have been the individual who was reported as attempting to sell a telescope with a cracked lens at the Autumn Fair in Frankfurt in September 1608. He was, in any case, frequently on the wrong side of the law, with assault and non-payment of debt among the many items on his criminal record. Most serious were two accusations of forgery, for which he was eventually threatened with the death penalty. It seems that he had produced counterfeit Spanish coins in an admirably patriotic attempt to undermine the Spanish economy but somehow had forgotten to stop when the Spanish and Dutch eventually signed a truce in 1609. Wisely, Sacharias disappeared before the sentence could be carried out.
Other records show that the premises of the Janssen family business, in the market square near the abbey in Middelburg, were just a few doors away from Hans Lipperhey’s. Perhaps ideas had flowed from one to the other. Even more interesting is the testimony of a man who claimed to be Sacharias Janssen’s son—one Johannes Sachariassen. In 1634, Sachariassen boasted to a friend that his father had constructed the first telescope in the Netherlands. He had copied it as early as 1604 from one that had belonged to an Italian, an instrument that had apparently carried the inscription ‘anno 1[5]90’. Albert Van Helden has presented a plausible scenario in which this mysterious Italian instrument may have been one of the weak telescopic aids to vision that Giovanbaptista Della Porta described in his Natural Magic, in 1589. Middelburg is known to have hosted large numbers of Italian exiles, most of whom were deserters—mercenary soldiers tired of helping the Spanish in their attempt to subdue the United Provinces. Perhaps Janssen did, indeed, make a copy of an instrument brought from Italy and managed to improve it to the stage that it could provide useful magnification.
In any event, these accounts suggest that Lipperhey might not, after all, have been the original inventor of the telescope, despite having been first off the mark in the historical record. Perhaps the proximity of his shop to Janssen’s allowed him to gain some understanding of what his fellow optician was up to. There is even a suggestion in some sources that Lipperhey’s children may have learned the secret of the telescope by holding up two lenses of the right kind, one behind the other—either by accident or after being shown.
CONSPIRACY THEORY
As we have seen, there is an enormous amount of roughly contemporary documentation on the origin of the telescope, dating from before 1608 to beyond the middle of the century. Much of it is confused and contradictory, and the problem lies in knowing how much weight to place on each item. In a chapter such as this, it is only possible to scratch the surface. However, the recent study by M. Barlow Pepin explores this material in great detail and arrives at a rather more subtle interpretation of the evidence.
Yes, says Pepin, Janssen did indeed perfect the telescope on the basis of a device he was shown by an Italian in 1604. But Lipperhey’s knowledge of how to build such an instrument did not come merely from hanging around outside Janssen’s shop doorway when things were quiet. It came, instead, from a much more intriguing source. Pepin cites an extraordinary passage in a book with the catchy title of Telescopium, sive ars perficiendi novum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera, by one Girolamo Sirtori, published in 1618 but probably written six years earlier when the events were still fresh in the author’s memory. The book’s title loosely translates as ‘About Telescopes: Perfecting the Art of Making Galileo’s New Instrument for Looking at the Stars’, and in it we read that
a man as yet unknown, with the appearance of a Hollander, visited Johann Lippersein [sic] at Middelburg in Zeeland. This [Lipperhey] is a man of striking air and appearance, and a maker of spectacles; as no-one else in that city: he [the visitor] ordered several lenses made, convex as well as concave. On the appointed day, the stranger returned, demanding the finished work. When he had them to hand, he picked up a pair; specifically a convex and a concave, placing one and then the other before his eye, separating them from one another, little by little as if to reach the focal point; after the manner of checking the spectacle-maker’s handiwork. He then paid the artisan and left. The optician, who was not without inkling through all of this, began to do the same thing out of curiosity. He soon solved the problem which nature presented by fixing the spectacle lenses in a tube. As soon as he was finished, he hurried to the Palace of Prince Maurice and presented his invention. The prince already had a telescope, suspected that it might have military value, and of necessity had kept it a secret. But now that he found the concept had become known through chance, he dissembled, rewarding the industry and benevolence of the maker.
Pepin (from whose book the above translation is taken) goes to great lengths to identify the ‘unknown man’ mentioned in the passage. Remarkably, he finds evidence suggesting that it may have been an undercover emissary of the Spanish commander-in-chief Ambrogio Spinola, perhaps looking for the raw material to duplicate an amazing far-seeing instrument that his enemy, Prince Maurice, already had.
This passage brings into question the idea that Prince Maurice hadn’t seen a telescope until Lipperhey delivered one to him. We are explicitly told that he had one already (or, in an alternative translation of the same passage, by Van Helden, knew of one already). So were there, in fact, two telescopes? Here, Pepin cites other evidence, specifically the work of a French diarist of the era, Pierre de L’Estoile, a minor government official with a keen eye for detail in contemporary events. In a diary entry for 30 April 1609 he describes telescopes he had seen on sale in Paris and adds
I have been told that the invention was due to a spectacle-maker of Middelburg in Zeeland, and that last year he presented to Prince Maurice two of them with which things that were three or four miles distant were seen clearly.
This second mention of two telescopes lends weight to the idea. Of course, it’s possible that de L’Estoile was simply misinformed, but taking the diary entry at face value it certainly supports the strange passage in Sirtori’s book.
Pepin develops a scenario that accounts rather neatly for this evidence. Suppose the shady Sacharias Janssen had, indeed, spent four years developing the weakly magnifying device shown to him by an Italian and had managed to make a telescope. Suppose he had presented his invention to Prince Maurice rather earlier in the peace negotiations with Spain, no doubt with an eye on a patent. Now imagine that it was this instrument, not Lipperhey’s, that Maurice gloatingly showed to Spinola. This is consistent with the historical documentation, but, significantly, it eliminates the need for all the action in the story to be compressed into the last two or three days of September, as it would have to have been if Prince Maurice had seen only Lipperhey’s telescope. This is an aspect of Pepin’s theory that is particularly appealing.
Pursuing the idea further, what does Spinola now do? He knows the telescope came from Middelburg. Wishing to obtain one for his own forces before he leaves the Netherlands, he instructs his undercover agent to go to the town, hunt out the person who made it and either buy one or buy the lenses to make one. But there’s an unexpected problem. The itinerant Janssen is on his way to the important Autumn Fair in Frankfurt, 600 kilometres to the south, where he subsequently attempts to sell a telescope with a cracked lens. So when the undercover agent looks for a spectacle-maker in Middelburg, whose shop does he find? The passage in Sirtori’s Telescopium gives us the answer: not Janssen’s, but Lipperhey’s, a few doors away.
Lipperhey, having been given the secret of the telescope by Spinola’s undercover agent, quickly knocks up one of his own, thinks, ‘I might be able to earn a fast buck or two from the government with this’, and heads off towards The Hague, having first obtained a letter of introduction from one of his local councillors. And, because Prince Maurice doesn’t say ‘Oh, I’ve got one of those already’ when Lipperhey eventually arrives to present his telescope to him, the official record accords priority in the invention to Lipperhey.
Pepin suggests that the reason for Prince Maurice’s secrecy is at least partly due to Janssen’s shady character, the spectacle-maker much preferring clandestine dealings to anything open and above board. And, indeed, that might also have suited the delicacy of the diplomatic situation. But things came unstuck for Janssen when he arrived back in Middelburg after the two-week trip home from Frankfurt and found that Lipperhey had somehow pre-empted his claim on the invention. Perhaps Janssen’s wish to regain his priority without giving too much away explains why the second letter from the Zeeland councillors to the States General speaks only of ‘a young man’, without mentioning any names.
Whatever your view of this interpretation of the evidence—unbelievably far-fetched or entirely plausible—I hope you will agree with me that Pepin has performed a service to historians of the telescope by suggesting possibilities that are far from obvious. That, in itself, is a step forwards.
For what it’s worth, however, my own opinion is that this scenario still leaves questions unanswered. I find it hard to believe that Prince Maurice would not have given some hint of the turn of events to the members of the States General, who, unless they were particularly disingenuous in their record-keeping, were completely unaware of the existence of the telescope before Lipperhey appeared. Moreover, the documentary evidence is hardly watertight, being based entirely on second-hand reports.
I suspect that we will never know for certain who actually invented the telescope, unless completely new evidence appears. The answer to the question of why it emerged so suddenly from obscurity, apparently in several places at once, might simply be that the necessary ingredients were all there. The skills of glass-makers and opticians had recently developed to the stage where lenses of the required quality could be produced. Once they were available it was inevitable that someone would eventually stumble across the right combination of lenses. And, with the Netherlands embroiled in military crisis, you’d have to be pretty dumb not to perceive the possible value of such an invention. Competition from other spectacle-makers prone to bad behaviour would only pile on the pressure.
Clearly, several people knew the secret of the telescope in the early 1600s. Metius’ claim to originality appears to be genuine, but Alkmaar was relatively remote. Middelburg, on the other hand, had a major glass factory of its own, the only one in Zeeland. That small Dutch town seems the most likely place for the first real telescope to have emerged from the work-stained hands of its maker.
As we have seen, Galileo transformed the telescope into an engine of discovery for astronomy. But it would be wrong to imagine that he was the first to point a telescope towards the sky. In a note written in October 1608, one of the foreign diplomats observing the peace process said of Lipperhey’s telescope that ‘even the stars, which ordinarily are invisible to our sight and our eyes, because of their smallness and the weakness of our sight, can be seen by means of this instrument.’ Someone, therefore—we have no idea who—had noted the telescope’s ability to enhance the eye’s sensitivity to faint light early in the piece, perhaps even during those last few days before Spinola’s departure from The Hague at the end of September. Notwithstanding all the questions that still surround the telescope’s appearance—and all the bad behaviour that went with it—there can be no doubt that that extraordinary month in the northern autumn of 1608 truly heralded astronomy’s awakening.
SEPTEMBER 2008
If you’re going to have a birthday party, the one thing you definitely need is a cake. But our cake was beginning to look like only a remote possibility. You couldn’t say it was anyone’s fault, though. A few days before, there had been a fire in the Channel Tunnel, and all Eurostar trains out of London were still hopelessly behind schedule. Having risen at the crack of dawn we’d had an interminably long wait at St Pancras, and it was only because our Stargazer tour coordinator, Marnie, and her offsider, Emma, had managed to find the right person in the Eurostar office to flutter their eyelashes at that we had got onto the train at all.
So our arrival in Brussels was much, much later than planned. The birthday party was scheduled to take place that evening in The Hague, 400 years to the day (almost) since Hans Lipperhey had arrived there with his telescope. It was to be a grand affair, as befits a party for something so important. But the cake-makers to the Dutch royal family, from whom, months earlier, Marnie had ordered the birthday cake, closed their doors strictly at 6 pm. And The Hague is a two-hour coach ride from Brussels.
In the event, we made it. But our arrival in The Hague, at 5.55 pm, was more akin to a space shuttle re-entry than the dignified entrance of a study tour into a provincial capital. At a spot that gave every appearance of being a freeway intersection in the middle of nowhere the coach screeched to a halt, and Marnie shot out and disappeared into the distance, taking hurried directions from the folk at the cake shop via her mobile phone as she ran. Piecing things together afterwards, I guessed we were where the E19 joins the A4, but who knows? The bottom line was that I never expected to see Marnie again.
Astonishingly, she got there in time to pick up the most beautiful cake specially decorated with a seventeenth-century telescope made of chocolate. All was well. All she had to do was pay for the cake and catch a cab to our hotel. Ah, but no. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t take credit cards . . .’ With Marnie’s wallet full of pounds rather than euros and no sign of an ATM, this looked like the end of the road. But another five minutes of fast talking found Marnie—a stranger from the other side of the world—walking out of the door carrying a €210 cake and leaving behind only the vaguest promise of how it would be paid for.
The party was an outstanding success and a highlight of the entire tour. We toasted the telescope and all its fans—Hans, Jacob, Sacharias, Maurice, Ambrogio and even the ‘unknown man’—late into the night. The one person who missed out was Galileo, but that was only because the following week we were heading for his old stamping ground in Padua, where he’d perfected the telescope, and later for his home turf of Florence. So Galileo would be well toasted, too.
The morning after the birthday party, despite being slightly the worse for wear, a small group of us were heading down to Middelburg, where a symposium on the invention of the telescope was being held. Some good friends of mine from the world of telescope history were going to be there, as well as scholarly megastars like Albert Van Helden, so I was keen for us to be on our way. Somehow, though, the same gremlin that had plagued the trip from London had been busy again.
Marnie, having picked up a rented minibus for the trip from a local garage, accepted their help in programming the GPS to get her back to her waiting passengers at the hotel. But the incorrect destination that they accidentally entered sent her off on the motorway to Rotterdam—from which there’s no easy exit. An hour and a half later she arrived to pick us up, just a tad flustered. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ we said. ‘We can set up the GPS to get us there in double-quick time.’ One of the group punched in the details of the Roosevelt Academy, where the symposium was being held. Two hours later, while we circled aimlessly through an anonymous housing estate on the outskirts of Middelburg, the GPS confidently informed us that we had arrived.
The symposium, when we finally did arrive, was truly inspiring. It was great to chat to some of the experts in the field, and I was quietly delighted when a few of them said they had read some of my own efforts on the subject. And then it was almost time to head back to The Hague—but there was one more pilgrimage to make first. The abbey church in Middelburg, whose imposing façade had separated the shops of spectacle-makers Hans Lipperhey and Sacharias Janssen at the turn of the seventeenth century, is still there. Rebuilt following extensive damage during the Second World War, the area reveals no trace of the shops that once dotted the square, but the church has been beautifully restored and stands in imposing defiance of the ravages of war. For anyone inspired by the story of the birth of the telescope, this is hallowed ground, and we relished our few moments there before continuing on our way.
Mercifully, the trip back to The Hague was uneventful, but once Marnie had dropped off all the tired and grateful telescope nuts at their hotel there was one final task for her. An early flight to Copenhagen the following morning meant that this had to be done now. So, stealing out into the night, she drove the empty minibus to somewhere near the junction of the E19 and the A4, found the shop of the cake-makers to the Dutch royal family and stuffed €210 under the locked door. I wonder if they ever found it?
A PRODUCT OF HER TIME?
There’s one last piece of bad behaviour I’d like to relate, and it concerns our tour destination immediately before the journey to The Hague. We were on another pilgrimage, this time to Greenwich, where the Royal Observatory was founded by decree of King Charles II, in 1675, ‘for the perfecting of the art of navigation’. Walking around Christopher Wren’s beautiful Octagon Room, purpose-built for astronomical observations, in the leafy surroundings of Greenwich Park, it was easy to imagine the first astronomer royal, John Flamsteed, carrying out his work there.
The bad behaviour I am referring to was not on the part of Flamsteed—who, like Tycho, did have a short fuse—but on the part of his wife, Margaret. Not wishing to appear in any way discriminatory, you see, I looked for examples of female astronomers behaving badly when I was preparing this chapter. I’m afraid I looked in vain. Partly, of course, that is because until recently there have been few women astronomers, but I suspect it also says something about the equanimity of women under duress.
The best example I could find was that of Margaret Flamsteed. There’s no doubt that she had an exemplary record as a devoted wife and the perfect hostess when visitors came to the observatory. But when she became a widow, in 1719, she found herself faced with the monumental task of completing two of the three volumes of the British Catalogue of the Heavens, Flamsteed’s great catalogue of star positions, which had been in preparation when he died. She engaged the help of her late husband’s assistant Joseph Crosthwait and a former colleague, Abraham Sharp. You may remember Sharp as the owner of Horton Hall in Yorkshire, whose crumbling shell I visited as a youngster. Horton Hall was 300 kilometres from Greenwich—half a world away, in the 1720s. But despite this great inconvenience, Sharp and Crosthwait managed between them to complete the work.
The three volumes eventually appeared in 1725, dedicated by Margaret Flamsteed to King George I, but without any mention of the laborious efforts of Crosthwait and Sharp. Worse followed. When Mrs Flamsteed died, four years later, Crosthwait wrote bitterly to Sharp at his Yorkshire home:
You and I have laboured for Mrs Flamsteed for above ten years, and our reward, so often promised, is at last befallen us. Mrs Flamsteed died the 29th ultimo, and has given . . . to you and I not one farthing . . . Could Mr Flamsteed have seen her ingratitude, I am confident he would not have left it in her power.
It’s a sad letter, but them’s the breaks. It’s all you can expect when you deal with stargazers (or their spouses) behaving badly.