The Telescope

The telescope is one of the most important inventions in human history, ultimately enabling humanity to gaze beyond the limits of biological sight and begin a greater understanding of the cosmos. In this episode of Invention, Robert and Joe explore the invention’s history and impact.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Land, and I'm
Joe McCormick, and I thought we should start today with
a question about science, one that is maybe more vexing
the more you think about it. So an often unexamined

(00:23):
assumption that undergird's scientific investigation all of science is this
idea that there are laws of nature, right, and that
those laws are are physically fundamental, and they apply everywhere
and they are never violated. Right. Yeah, it would be um,
it would be catastrophic if science changed from say country

(00:44):
to country or county to county. Right, you go across
the state line and you fall upright. Yeah. So water
boils at a hundred degrees celsius or two twelve fahrenheit
in my kitchen, it should also boil at the same
temperature in my bedroom, or in the kitchen of the
white castle down the street, or a hundred miles away
in a different town. Right now. You might interrupt there
and say, oh, but actually water sometimes does boil at

(01:06):
a different temperature, right, Like at high elevations, uh, where
atmospheric pressure is lower, it's easier for water to boil
because there's less pressure pressing down on the water, so
it actually does boil at a lower temperature, like at
three thousand meters, water boils at more like nine d
degrees celsius. And in fact, Robert, I don't know if
you've ever read these, there are great stories that take
this to the extreme. Did you know about the unbearable

(01:29):
sadness of boiling potatoes on Mount Everest? So there are
these stories about mountaineers trying to cook on Mount Everest
and they would boil potatoes in a pot of water
to eat them, but they boil them and they boil
them and boil them for hours and hours, and after
hours of cooking, the potatoes were still basically raw. And
the problem is on Mount Everest that you're up so

(01:52):
high that the boiling point is so low. The boiling
water in the pot is not hot enough to cook potatoes.
It's like sort of like trying to cook them in
hot tap water even though it's boiling. It's a In fact,
I would say it's actually like an inverse pressure cooker, right,
you know, pressure cooker allows your food to get hotter
because of the increased pressure going up on Mount Everest.

(02:13):
And trying to cook something is like doing the opposite.
But actually, you know, there, we've not discovered an absence
of an underlying law just because water boils at a
different temperature at different elevations. What we've actually discovered is
a deeper underlying law that the boiling point of a
liquid varies along with pressure, and that that relationship is
mathematically deterministic. And I would say this is the assumption

(02:35):
that pretty much guides almost all of applied science in
the world today. It's the idea that the laws of
physics are out there and they don't change or very
depending on special cases or where you are. But how
do we know that conditions on the Earth and the
Moon might be different, but that the underlying physical laws
that give rise to those conditions are exactly the same.

(02:58):
And maybe one thing that's important to point out in
understanding this is that people haven't always thought this way.
There is a powerful tradition, going back into the ancient world,
sort of viewing the behaviors of things in reality as
a large collection of special cases, governed by their own

(03:18):
special essences and and by by special circumstances, maybe like
divine intervention, maybe like some types of magic, maybe just
by you know, the essence of the way a person
falls is different than the way a planet falls, because
a planet is a different thing than a person, And
so you you'd end up with the idea that the

(03:38):
heavens are not subject to the same physical forces as
the Earth. And we see this all throughout ancient cosmology,
just thinking that there are different different laws applying to
different places and circumstances in the universe. Now, on one hand,
you could argue that, well, we don't really know that
physical laws are the same everywhere, right, and and that's

(03:58):
kind of true, like at the very edges of our understanding.
There could be ways of arguing that physical laws aren't
really laws, you know, maybe they're just generalizations we make
based on observation, or maybe there could be cosmological scenarios
when they're different. You know, maybe in the beginning of
the universe the laws were different or could have been different.
But for the most purposes in the present, that assumption

(04:20):
that the physical laws are the same everywhere has proven
extremely useful and generating accurate scientific theories that make correct
predictions and create powerful technology. So I wanted to think
about at the beginning of today. Where did this assumption
of the uniformity of physical laws come from? How did
we end up thinking this way about the world, that
there's just sort of like a set of underlying ways

(04:43):
that things work and that that governs everything. Well, as
the title of the show indicates, we're going to tie
it to an invention, you're exactly right now, we don't
want to tie it entirely to this invention, because there
are a bunch of different strains of thinking throughout history
that I think have contributed to this way of seeing
the world that we generally share now. But I believe
one really powerful moment of transition here was centered around

(05:07):
a particular piece of technology, and that technology is the
subject of today's episode, which is the telescope. Yes, more
specifically the optical telescope. Right now, we're just doing one
episode today here, so we're not going to be able
to focus on all the different kinds of telescopes. We
may come back to them in the future, but we're
gonna be focusing on specifically the earliest optical refracting telescopes,

(05:31):
right and uh, and yeah, it's really it really is
kind of hard to to overstate the importance of the
telescope in the history of science and in the history
of our understanding of the cosmos. Yeah, there's a great
quote about the invention from the Invention of the Telescope
by Albert van Helden. From van Helden writes, quote, among

(05:52):
the scientific instruments which have played an important role in
the growth of man's knowledge of the world around him,
the telescope occupies a position of historic pre eminence, rivaled
only by the microscope, which was a natural outgrowth of
the telescope. In a real sense, the telescope can be
considered the prototype of modern scientific instruments, and learned men
in the seventeenth century, the first century of its existence,

(06:16):
were acutely aware of its important role in the formation
of a new astronomy. Yeah, and some of the earliest
accounts of what was viewed through the very first telescopes.
You can you can kind of feel the electricity coming
off of the writing, right, like, like the excitement with
seeing stuff that not just seeing new things. I mean
we still see new things in the heavens that people

(06:37):
have never seen before. Just this year there was the
very first direct imaging of a black hole, not using
an optical telescope, but but using you know, a form
of magnifying the heavens. And that was astonishing because we
were looking at something we've never seen before. But as
amazing as that was, what if instead of just seeing
a new thing, you were able to see the universe

(06:58):
in a completely different way that now, for the first time,
you can look at really anything beyond the moon as
more than a point of light. Yeah, it's really I
mean it's really hard to avoid optical metaphors for this
optical technology. Like I want to think, it's like it's
like being able having poor eyesight your entire life and

(07:19):
then finally putting on a pair of glasses and seeing
things come into sharper detail, you know, solidifying things that
you suspected already, but also bringing you know, fine print
into view that was invisible to you previously. That sort
of thing. Yeah, And I think that's another reason why
the telescope is such. Um, you know, a major invention

(07:41):
is that we are predominantly, you know, optical beings. We
depend so much on our sense of sight, and this
so greatly improved our ability to do optically see things. Well. Yeah,
I mean, one thing that's worth thinking about is the
very idea that that we could even view the heavens

(08:02):
with a with a viewing instrument, you know, with a
magnification device that's entirely contingent on the details of life
on planet Earth. If you go to another planet where
maybe life forms evolved at the bottom of an ocean
around geothermal vents or growing off of some kind of
like you know, chemosynthesis process in a clouded, hazy atmosphere
like that of Venus or that of Titan, where you

(08:23):
just can't you can't see the guy. I mean, there's
no reason we had to evolve on a planet where
you could look at the stars every night, but somehow
we did. And of course those stars have always intrigued us.
I mean, human history is a story of of people's
looking to the heavens and trying to figure out what
is going on up there. Yeah, and that's a great
point we should start with, which is that astronomy did

(08:45):
not begin with the telescope. Astronomy long predates the telescope.
There is a vast tradition of naked eye astronomy going
back in ancient history, and sometimes it's astonishing what ancient
and medieval astronomers could figure out. It could discuss ever
without optical telescopes, just using the naked eye, sometimes maybe
in conjunction with other primitive tools like measuring instruments or something.

(09:08):
I mean, for starters, like other planets were known before
before the telescope. Right, Oh yeah, a Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn are all observable with the naked eye. Uh,
Uranus and Neptune are generally considered to be only visible
via the telescope with with an asterix there. Yeah, Uranus
is uranus. We always fight about how to pronounce this Urinus.

(09:31):
Let's say, Uranus is technically I think visible with the
naked eye under extremely favorable conditions, but it's very, very faint.
It was officially usually recognized as being discovered by William
Herschel in Sight one with the telescope. Of course, telescopes
had been around for a good long while in Sight one,
but it had probably been observed by others in centuries

(09:52):
past who thought it was some kind of faint star,
just barely visible. Herschel actually initially thought Uranus was a comet.
On our other podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we
we've been kind of considering the different planets and there
in their their their moons. From time to time, we
really we really need to go to look at the
outer planets a little more. Oh yeah, I wonder if

(10:14):
there's there's much to say there. I feel like the
really sexy moons show up around Saturn and Jupiter. Like
on Jupiter you've got Europa, which is everybody's favorite to
find some potential life at because they think their oceans
underneath the icy crust. And then you've got Io, which
is just a wonderful yellow hell of volcanoes and sulfur

(10:35):
and all that great stuff. And then around Saturn, of
course you've got Titan, which is an intriguing mystery. I'm
not aware of anything like that going on with Neptune
or Uranus, but maybe I haven't given them a fair ship.
I mean, the planets themselves, I think would be would
be good topics, you know, uh, just so we can
say that we have covered all of them, uh you know,
just in time to have to like update with new
information for all of Oh yeah, well I can't. We'll

(10:56):
do We'll do an episode on Uranus just so we
can pronounce its seventeen different Yeah. I believe a listener
provided a different pronunciation recently, didn't they we heard I
think we've heard uranus. Of course, we've heard uranus. We've
heard uraas uh. I think that's it for now. Well,
we gotta bring you back to the telescope. Okay, So
here here's a question. I wonder about how many stars

(11:18):
can you actually see without a telescope. I know there's
got to be some general cut off point that most
people aren't going to be able to see stars below
a certain brightness. Yes, yeah, there's there's a there's a
there's a system here for determining how visible various objects are,
and there is a ballpark number. According to astronomer dorit

(11:40):
Hof Late of Yale University, the total number of stars
in the sky that can currently be seen from both
hemispheres and given optimal conditions, is nine thousand and ninety
six or four thousand, five forty eight stars per hemisphere,
give or take, depending on the position in the season.
It's monomers use the magnitude scale to measure star and

(12:03):
planet brightness, so the higher the number, the fainter the
object is in the sky. So the naked eye limit
for most humans is six point five. Now, really bright
objects actually have a negative rating on this scale. So
a full moon is a negative twelve point seven highly visible,
and the sun, yeah, everybody's seen this, uh, is a

(12:26):
negative twenty six point seven. Now, I was looking at
an article on this from Sky and Telescope, which is
a wonderful website for anyone that's interested in astronomy, and
Bob King has an article from titled nine thousand and
ninety six stars in the sky? Is that all? And
and he shares the following that was just a nice
quote about the visibility that this. You know, this brings

(12:49):
up quote. While the total number of naked eye stars
may seem unimpressive, consider what happens in the sky in
and around cities where most of us live. From the suburbs,
the magnitude limit is around plus four for a worldwide
total of about nine hundred stars, or half that for
your location. If we set the city limit at magnitude

(13:10):
plus two stars similar to the Big Dipper in brightness,
we're left with just seventies stars worldwide, or thirty five
stars visible from say downtown Chicago or Boston, right, because
you're only ever seeing half. Yeah, that's that's a paltry
number of stars. That kind of makes me hate our cities. Well, yeah,
I mean, light pollution is a real detriment to uh,

(13:32):
you know, in any kind of you know, amateur or
certainly professional astronomy. I think I've mentioned this on one
of our podcasts before, and at the risk of getting sappy,
I one time went to a rural area in Oregon,
you know, not near any big cities, and I guess
it must have been very clear and dry in the night,
and and I went outside, and I remember I saw

(13:56):
so many stars. I I felt like I was going
to fall over. And it was overwhelming. How different the
sky is in a really dark sky area. Oh yeah.
I had a similar experience in Georgia's own okay, Finoki Swamp,
which is an area where is it's just there's no
light pollution. You get out in just the midst of
this enormous swamp land, and the stars are just overwhelming.

(14:19):
Like it's no wonder that people sometimes and let's say
that they've encountered a you know, they've seen a UFO
in the sky. Um, because in a way it's like
like seeing the cosmos like that, um, you know, unfiltered
by light pollution. It it you know, it's It's almost
like seeing some sort of alien spaceship. You know, you're

(14:39):
you're confronted with the enormity of the cosmos. It was
a borderline religious experience for me. I mean it felt
like it felt like a revelation. I've gone my whole
life on Earth looking up at the sky at night
and never seen anything like this. Now that being said,
an informed look at the skies, even from a city
such as Atlanta, you can you can still have some

(15:01):
you know, some interesting, you know, astronomical observations like it's
it's it's wonderful video to be able to say, pinpoint
Mars in the sky and pointed out to somebody and
think about the fact that that is it. This is
the planet that we've you know that do you hear
about on the news that you see these this footage job.
There's so many questions have been asked about there it

(15:23):
is in the sky, I am observing it. Oh yeah,
I've I've tried to cultivate that skill before, being able
to just point things out in the sky, and I've
never gotten good at it. Well, the apps really help
these days. There's so many great um Star and Planet
i D apps you can sort of cheat off of
those and then have the experience you know, Yeah, I
do like trying to find the direction of the center

(15:43):
of the galaxy at any given time and point in
the direction of Sagittary as a star, the supermassive black hole,
which I know our descendants must be destined to someday
just drive straight into. Now. Of course, all the stuff
we were just talking about is looking up with the
naked eye with a tell us gope. Things are very different,
right because they magnify light so uh so with just

(16:05):
the original refracting optical telescope, which was just a convex
lens that gathered light from a wider field, and then
it was paired at a certain distance with a concave eyepiece. Uh. Galileo,
when he was looking into the sky was astonished by
what he saw. He wrote, I have seen stars in
myriads which have never been seen before, and which surpassed

(16:28):
the old previously known stars in number more than ten times. Right.
I mean we have to think back to that magnitude scale,
you know, and the idea that suddenly, uh, cosmic bodies
of a magnitude or more beyond previous human observation are
now visible. Yeah, like it's it's you know, it's really

(16:49):
crazy to imagine that. You really have to underline that statement. Yeah,
and this would have been at the beginning of the
sixteen hundreds. He's using the most primitive telescopes. Now, of
course we see it's funny we can look can do
like a little tiny patch of the sky where before
there would have been nothing, and with the powerful telescopes
of today, we zoom in and see almost like ah,
it's like when you you know, zoom in on water

(17:11):
with a microscope and you see all the little bacteria
living in it, except now we see galaxies full of
stars where previously we thought there was nothing. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
but when we come back, we're going to get to
the question who invented the telescope? Where did it come from?
And and more importantly, like what does it say about

(17:31):
the time the timing of this invention? Alright, we're back.
So now we're talking about the invention of the original
optical telescope, and we should start off saying at the
very top that credit for the invention of the telescope
is highly disputed. What counts you know, do just like

(17:54):
descriptions written in a book count if we don't have
evidence that it was actually made, what were people actually
talking about when they wrote about various kinds of magnification. Historically,
credit for the invention of the telescope is most often
given to a figure we're going to mention in just
a minute, a Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Lipper shy
or Hans lippersh lippers hay is how I've seen multiple

(18:19):
different pronunciations. Uh so, yeah, so lippers hey, Lipper she
lippers high. We'll we'll say them all, but there are
a lot of different contenders that that have competed in
the minds of historians, and we won't have time to
mention them all. We will highlight a few, right, yeah,
and uh yeah, it's we we really have to stress
that not only it's not just one of these things
where it was disputed later, where like historians are saying, actually,

(18:42):
this person working in this other land had you know,
some other ideas or seemed to have a product type
and no, I mean it was disputed at the time
in Lipper's own country. Yeah, and we'll touch on the
details of that. Well. I think one of the reasons
that it's so disputed is that the essential technolo ology
for creating the telescope had existed for a long time

(19:04):
before anybody ever made a telescope exactly. So Leprosy lived
fifteen seventy through sixteen nineteen, and it's worth noting that
that here at this point in in his life, he was,
of course a spectacle maker, and spectacles had been around
in Europe for at least three centuries. Uh. And I'd
actually love to come back to a future episode of

(19:25):
Invention where we'll talk about those three centuries, talk about uh, glasses,
spectacles where they came from. But basically the idea is,
as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and its economy
rebounded from the invasions of the Dark Ages, it became
increasingly beneficial to ensure that functional eyesight was maintained in
their aging scholars and scribes. So that that's why eyeglasses

(19:50):
west by spectacles emerged really in Europe, well right, I mean,
eyeglasses would be a technology that extended the working life
of people who copied documents for living and because they
didn't have a printing press yet in some of that time,
hand copying of documents was incredibly important for preserving knowledge

(20:10):
and spreading it. Yeah, this is the necessity in the
invention scenario here. Um. You know, eyeglasses are largely attributed
to a Venetian invention, sometimes around thirteen hundred and for
our fellow name of the rose Fans out there, the
story of murders in a medieval abbey that they take
place in thirteen seven, and their their use is certainly

(20:32):
factors into a burn of Echo's plot. The use of spectacles. Yeah,
the main detective in the story, William of Baskerville. He
has a pair of spectacles, but they're not like normal, right,
It's not like, oh, you can just go get new
spectacles somewhere, Like if he loses them, that's a problem. Yeah, yeah,
for sure. But yeah, some three hundred years separate the
birth of spectacles and ultimately the birth of the spectacle

(20:52):
making trade. Uh from this event right where a spectacle
maker takes the technology and creates tell us gop out
of it. And then the reason for creating this telescope
is it turns out it's not to gaze at the heavens,
but to better kill people on the battlefield. I see.
So basically and this is this is the story as

(21:13):
it specifically concerns Lippers. During the early sixteen hundreds, Dutch
military reformer Prince Maurice of Nassau offered monetary rewards for
any inventions that could help modernize the Dutch fighting force.
Lippers took his knowledge of spectacles and applied them to
the problem, developing what he called the Looker, which he

(21:36):
filed a patent for in six eight and their varying
versions of Lippers's eureka moment ranging from him observing children
playing with lenses in his shop and watching them, you know,
hold one lens up and then hold the other lens
up and make objects at a distance appear closer. And
then there are also just accusations that he he flat

(21:56):
out stole the idea from someone else, and we'll get
to that as well. But the question that emerges from
all this is wouldn't this invention have been obvious to
anyone familiar with the three hundred year old technology of spectacles. Yeah,
so you've spectacles work on the principle of magnification through
refraction through glass. So you've got glass as a transparent medium.

(22:19):
You can make a rounded edge on the outside of
one of these discs of glass right like and basically
it's it's all detailed in this uh, this this story
of children playing with with with lenses like someone would
have surely seen that before. And you know, this is
ultimately exactly why the States General of the Netherlands denied

(22:39):
his patent application, as well as the application of two
other individuals, Jacob Midius, a lens maker from a family
of glass workers, and Zacharias Johnson, a spectacle maker. And
they've both been proposed as the alternate inventor of the telescope,
right and in other names and plots are thrown into

(23:00):
the mix as well, and and sometimes the microscope is
likewise brought up because the microscope has we already mentioned
or brought up in that quote we were at it's
kind of an extension of the same technology. But when
when Lippers, say, sought a thirty year patent or he
also was going to settle for a yearly pension to
prevent the lookers sale to rival kingdoms, the States General

(23:21):
declared that the invention was already too widely known and
too easy to copy. Still, the Prince awarded Lippers a
nine florins and asked him to make the looker binocular
okay for two eyes. So just not very impressed about
the telescope. Well impressed enough to pay him nine hundred florins,
you know, and to and to use it. But you know,

(23:43):
I guess you can well imagine the situation where the
military uh individuals are saying, yes, this sounds great, We're
gonna revolutionize everything, and then the patent office is like, okay, fine,
but let's not get carried away. Let's not get this
guy a patent because the the im for the knowledge
of this technology is already out there. Yeah. Now, one
of the sources we were both looking at about this
story of the invention of the telescope is the great

(24:06):
uh James Burke's discussion and connections. And one of the
things he does that's interesting is he connects the story
of the invention of the telescope. I guess he's all
about creating connections. Uh. He connects it to the invention
of the time piece, which I guess is something else
going on in the Dutch economy at the time, the
desire to make more accurate time pieces, because, like he

(24:26):
writes about how the springs of low quality and the
watches of the time would mean that some watches might
lose four minutes a day. Yeah, and the telescope is
will probably continue to touch on here and it has
this this definite relationship with precision and precision instruments of
the time and those that would come afterwards. Um. But
Burke also, you can, you know, makes the point here

(24:49):
about the connection between invention and social need. While there
was a social need for spectacles, which we we've already mentioned,
there was not one for the telescope. And I just
want to read a quote from Connections again. Connection was
both a television series but also is a is a
wonderful book. Both are widely available out there. If you
want to pick it out, pick it up. And if
you're a fan of of this podcast and just the

(25:10):
history of technology and inventions, you really can't go wrong
with Connections. So Burke rights quote. But there was no
demand for the telescope during this period, which was prior
to the invention of gunpowder and the use of the
cannon on the battlefield, when the view of the universe
precluded the existence of planetary bodies as three dimensional observable phenomena.

(25:31):
This is why the moment of invention is so often
identified with the moment in which the artifact comes into use.
In many cases, there are times when an invention is
technologically possible and in which indeed it may appear necessary,
as the telescope may have, but without a market, the
idea will not sell, and in the absence of the

(25:51):
technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will
not survive. This reminds me of the episode or episode
I think we did a couple on the wheel, a
technology that it appears within many cultures around the world
for a long time, there was the perfect capability to
make it and familiarity with the concept. So it's like

(26:13):
they understood what a wheel was, and they had everything
they needed to make wheels. They just didn't make wheeled vehicles. Uh.
And so the question is like, why why would you
Why would you know how to do it and have
everything you need to do it, but not yet do it.
And Burke is pointing out that sometimes it just it does.
It doesn't occur to people that there's a particular use

(26:35):
for a thing. By the way, Burke is referring to
the Western invention and use of gunpowder here, which which
has a history very worthy of its own invention episode
in the future. But the short version is that the
Chinese were aware of gunpowder as early as the ninth century,
and there are various accounts of gunpowder in Europe going
back to the hundreds. But guns would not become a
military technology worthy of telescopic sites for some time basically

(26:58):
seventeen seventy six, as I believe, and warfare itself hadn't
evolved to depend on it yet. So Burke's argument is
that the technological advancements of warfare didn't reach the point
uh and you know, at which this sort of lens
technology promised or even uh you know, suggested a real payoff,
not until the dawn of the sixteen hundreds, and so

(27:19):
the telescope was finally borne into an age increasingly in
need of long distance vision for military purposes and a
tool to star gaze beyond the limits of the human eye. Again,
to Brooke's point, we can sit around all day and
think of all about all the places and times it
would have been useful before the seventeenth century and could
have been applied. I mean, navigation seems that you know,

(27:40):
one of the key possibilities to me, But ultimately that's
just not how it came together, but camp but it
certainly did come together. And in fact, less than two
years after Lip says patent Uh, an individual by the
name of Galileo published a ground pay breaking treaties And
will come back to Galileo in just a little bit. Yeah.
Before we get to Galileo, though, we should talk about

(28:02):
a few of the other names that have been suggested
as alternate inventors of the telescope, because, as we said,
there there were a bunch of people who could have
been maybe given credit depending on what counts, what kind
of evidence you allow. One alternative that might not be
surprising given given a lot of the optical advances that
that existed in the in the Muslim world, especially in

(28:24):
the medieval period, is that several names from the air
world showed up on this list. Yeah. Yeah, for starters,
Like a key individual is al Hazen, which is the
Latin name for for the mathematician and astronomer Uh. Even
al hatham who lived at through Tin forty h ce

(28:45):
Um a k a Abu Ali al hatham Um is
a major figure. Particularly we have to consider his book
of Optics, which dealt with magnification and refraction, and which
ultimately influenced the technological traditions that would lead to the
invention of the telescope. At least he wrote commentaries on Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy,
and Galen. His writings were pretty influential in the in

(29:08):
the West at the you know, particularly among the likes
of Bacon and Kepler. Uh. Quote this is from os Marshall.
Um al Hazen and the telescope. He observed the magnifying
power of spheres and lenses and experimented with cylindrical, concave
and parabolic metal mirrors. So basically he's a figure that
some consider capable of inventing the telescope. Like if you're

(29:31):
looking in history for you know, to pinpoint and individual
who who could have very well created a telescope, Um
al Hazen is your guy. Uh. Though there is it
doesn't seem to be any clear evidence that he did,
but certainly all the skills were on the table some
six hundred years before Galileo. Another individual in the air

(29:52):
of world that pops up is um Taki al Din
or uh Taki od Den. Muhammad had been Maroof. He
was an Automan astronomer of note he lived fifty six
or fifteen eighty five, so much closer to the time
period we're discussing, um, you know, in in European traditions
here for the invention of the telescope. And uh, he

(30:13):
invented a number of pumps and clocks, uh, including an
astronomical clock. So again we're getting down to the technology
of precision again. And he apparently described an invention that
made far away objects appear closer. So it's possible that
he's talking about a telescope there. It's possible that he
invented a telescope in roughly fifteen seventy four, but there's

(30:34):
there's no clear consensus on this. But again an individual
where we we can look to and say this, it's
possible this individual created a telescope. And if they didn't,
there's no reason why they couldn't have. You know, they
had again all the tools were on the table. Uh.
There There have been other suggestions of some previous figures
from England, like Roger Bacon or like this guy named

(30:56):
Leonard Diggis who was apparently, uh, he was into surveying. Yeah,
and this is to show you, just like the how
how removed some of the descriptions are this was basically
his son. Leonard Diggin's son wrote that he you that
his father had used a proportional glass to view distant objects,
and this would have been the mid fifteen hundreds, and

(31:18):
so some historians have made a case for this, saying
like this, they're talking about a telescope. This guy invented
a telescope. But we just don't have much to go
on beyond that. All Right, This next guy I want
to talk about is not an especially strong contender, at
least I don't think so for actually having invented a telescope.
I would say that the credit that is possibly given

(31:40):
to him or was claimed by him for having invented
a telescope seems to be based on some vaguely written
passages about being able to see things at a distance
through through refractive lenses. But but I just wanted to
talk about him because he is very weird and a
fascinating figure, and the more I found out about him,
the more I wanted to to go deep. His name

(32:01):
is Giovanni Batista de la Porto or Giambatista de la Porta,
an Italian natural philosopher. A minor Neapolitan noble born around
fifteen thirty five died in sixteen fifteen. Sometimes depicted as
something of a sorcerer, sometimes as an enthusiast of the sciences,
sometimes as a quote professor of secrets. He was most notably,

(32:24):
I think, the author of a popular book called Magia
Naturalists meaning Natural Magic, which was a sort of encyclopedia
of marvels and curiosities about the world. And this book
has got everything it's it encompasses everything from facts about
geology and chemistry to cosmetic beauty tips. I think it's

(32:44):
got cooking tips in it. It's got demonology and his
opinions on it, like like a cult philosophy. And then
it's got this huge section on cryptography, including a whole
chapter about how to send secret messages inside eggs. Well,
I want to hear about these eggs. But but I
do want to point out that he would have been
a contemporary of John d uh the English um scientist,

(33:09):
spy occultist who is also interested in cryptography. So uh,
this was definitely a time to be into all of
these things. But now, do tell me about these eggs.
Oh yeah, it sounds like a type. Yes. Sixteenth century
seventeenth century type of dude who's into demonology and refraction
lenses and all that. Yeah, so sending secret messages inside eggs, eggs,

(33:34):
egg based cryptography, why eggs? Well? In Magia Naturalis, Delaporta
writes that quote, because when prisons are shut, eggs are
not stopped by the papal inquisition, and no fraud is
suspected to be in them. Well, not until you wrote
about it in your book, so he writes about this.

(33:54):
But yeah, the idea is that Delaporta and Medieva his friends,
were targets of the Italian Inquisition, and of course the
inquisitions going on at the time. Uh. And apparently while
you could not pass letters to friends imprisoned by the inquisitors,
at least not without those letters being read or sensored
or something, you could send your friends eggs, you know,
you just bring them eggs in prison. So he explains

(34:15):
many different methods for smuggling secret messages inside eggs, including
by chemically treating the eggs. One method involves writing the
message on paper. So you write out a letter and
then you soften the egg shell with vinegar and you
cut a tiny hole in the shell. With a knife
and insert the letter written on paper into the egg,
and then you put the egg in cold water to

(34:37):
firm up the egg again and disguise the cut. Another
method involves writing the message on the shell of the
egg with an ink that's like especially prepared ink made
out of galls alum and pickle and whatever that means.
He says, pickle and then um, and then boiling the egg.
And supposedly the message will wash off of the outer
shell when the egg boils, But then when the egg

(35:00):
is peeled, the message will appear written on the egg
white inside because this stuff leeches through the shell. This
is incredible. Why is this not our our easter? A
messaging tradition? Yeah, that's right. The kids they go out
hunting for eggs in the grass and then they pick
one up that says, do not submit to the inquisitors,

(35:20):
do not confess. Do not confess that we summoned the
power of payment. But anyway, Also in Maggia Naturalis, there's
a whole volume on lenses and refraction containing these vaguely
written passages that mentioned, uh, you know, combining lenses and
the ability to see things across distance. This apparently led
to the later misunderstanding that he may have prefigured the

(35:41):
invention of the telescope by uh liberty or lippershy or
lippers hey or however you say it, uh and the
other contemporaries. But modern scholars I think, seemed to be
doubtful that Delaporta was actually describing a telescope in his writings,
and there's certainly no record of him making or using one,
though it appears he did work with some other types
of lenses. Is more in the realm of spectacles or

(36:01):
magnifying glass. Of course, John D is notable for having
at least one lens of note that being more of
a like a magical black mirror, which is which is
currently I believe on display in the British Museum. Oh,
I'd like to see that. Yeah, look into it if
you get a chance. It's probably a mirror of some
historical mischief. Yeah, with Mesoamerican origins. I believe Christian and

(36:25):
I did a two parter on stuff to Blow your
mind about John D where we discussed the details of it. Well,
I think maybe we should take a break and then
we come back. We can discuss the earliest uses of
the telescope. And its impact on world history. Alright, we're back. So,

(36:46):
as we've discussed, the world was finally ready for the telescope.
The technology was there, the understanding of optics, the ability
to craft of the lenses, and and now you also
had the necessity the market for it. People were clamoring
for it, and we had the both the military, uh,
interested in the creation of telescopes. But then you had

(37:08):
plenty of star gates. There's plenty of the astronomers who
were were hungry for such a device. Yeah, I'd say
that even though it was commissioned as a weapon of war,
like the real bomb that it set off, was this
more theological, philosophical, scientific one. And so of course we
have to talk about Galileo. Now, Galileo Galilei was a
natural philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. He was the son

(37:32):
of a cloth merchant from the city of Pisa. He
lived fifteen sixty four to sixteen forty two, and he
was in many ways, uh, sort of an ideal heretic, right, Like,
we don't like to overplay the mythology of genius and
historical inventors, but I think with Galileo, this is one
case at least in my mind, where you can you

(37:52):
can really make the case for a person who truly
deserves to be thought of as a revolutionary genius who
systematically challenged scientific and philosophical misconceptions of his day with
kind of mercilessly careful thought and observation, and a champion
of empirical method. You know, the mindset that says, okay,
if you've got an idea about how the world is

(38:14):
in a way of looking at the world to check
and see if the idea is right, you should look
and check. So. Galileo is best known today for landing
a fatal blow against the theory of geocentrism. Under classic
geocentric cosmology, the Earth was the center of the universe,
and the Moon and the Sun and all the planets

(38:35):
orbited around the Earth. Now again, today, we know that
the Earth rotates, which is why the sky seems to
spin around the Earth. But the Earth feels pretty solid,
doesn't it, right, It doesn't feel like it's moving, and
we can watch the sky moving all around us. So
if you had to, how would you actually prove that
objects in the sky didn't orbit the Earth. Well, part

(38:56):
of it is, of course, observe if you get to
the point where you're tracking these objects that are presumably
moving around the Earth, and then you begin to notice
that they don't really behave like objects that are that
are orbiting around something you know well, right, and that
had been known for a long time, right, you know,
you'd see that the planets, don't they the planets don't
seem to perfectly go around the Earth in a in
a steady pattern. It's kind of odd, isn't it. Yeah, So,

(39:19):
like closer inspection of this model of the cosmos ultimately
ended up showing all these problems and the you know,
the clearly showed that that our understanding was not perfect.
Something was wrong with this model, right. So Galileo did
not invent the theory of helio centrism, which is the
idea that the Sun is the gravitational center of the
Solar system. He did not come up with that. Other

(39:41):
thinkers had already proposed this idea for various reasons, notably
the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus in uh in I believe
fifteen forty three or in the fifteen forties. He lived
fourteen seventy three to fifteen forty three. But Copernican heliocentrism,
while it had its defenders, had not been accepted by
the cat like Church, had not been accepted by the

(40:02):
all the academic authorities of the day. I think the
reigning expert opinion still viewed the universe much the way
Aristotle did, with an earth centered solar system, with special
types of motion for the objects in the heavens, with
celestial spheres that held up the planets as they orbited
the Earth out in space. So at the age of

(40:23):
twenty seven, Galileo was appointed a professor of mathematics at
the University of Padua, and he would go on to
challenge many of the strains of thinking about physics and
astronomy that have been dominant in European history. Often these
beliefs passed on by Aristotle. So one example of the
way he challenged these things was his important discoveries in

(40:43):
the physics of motion and inertia. I think just in
the past year, Robert we did an episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind where we talked about Galileo's thought
experiment about the falling bodies, you know, where he was
identifying the idea that the rate of acceleration for falling
objects is actually the same between lighter objects and heavier objects,
except for the influence of air resistance. But another question

(41:05):
that's interesting about inertia that was addressed by Galileo is
the idea of um, how do you tell how would
you tell if the Earth was rotating? If you're on
the surface of the Earth and it's spinning. Let's say
you're sort of a shoot from the hip seventeenth century
conventional physicist. You want to argue it's obvious the Earth
doesn't rotate because if you throw a ball straight up

(41:28):
in the air and the Earth were rotating, the ball
should land west of where you tossed it from right,
because the Earth should continue to rotate under it while
the ball is up at the air right and it's
kind of like a like a carnival ride. Um understanding
of how the earth rotation would work. But Galileo has
got a good answer for this. It doesn't fall away

(41:50):
from you if the ball and the Earth and the
atmosphere are all moving together at the same rate in
the same direction. This is a crucial bit of reasoning
about inertial reference frames. In the world of motion. Difference
means acceleration. If there are a group of objects all
moving in the same direction at the same speed, they

(42:11):
might as well be standing still with reference to each other.
It's only when the speed or the direction changes in
the motion that we notice the difference. So you throw
a ball straight up in the air on a rotating earth,
it's actually like throwing a ball straight up in the
air inside an airplane. Right. If you were able to
like take a cross section of the airplane and look

(42:32):
at the path of the ball, and you were standing
still just looking at it passed by, the ball would
go in an arc right, because it would go up
from the person's hand. But also everything in the plane,
including the ball, is going horizontally. You don't throw the
ball up in the airplane, first of all, don't throw
balls in the airplane. But if you throw a ball
up in the airplane, it's not going to just go flying, uh,

(42:53):
you know, straight back through the through the plane and
then smack into the door of the toilet exactly because
the airplane, the air inside the airplane, and the ball
and the person throwing it are all within the same
reference frame of horizontal motion. They're all traveling at the
same speed in the same direction. So relative to the
person in the plane, the ball just goes up and down.

(43:14):
And the same thing happens on Earth's surface. I mean,
if you were looking out from space, a ball thrown
straight up from the Earth's surface actually does go in
an arc, but relative to the person standing there who
threw it up, who's moving at the same speed, and
the around the around the center of rotation of the Earth,
it just goes straight up and down. So so, and
that's the realm of like physics and inertia, in which

(43:35):
Galileo was very influential and very important. But Galileo also
found out about the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands,
and he almost immediately had the insight to turn the
magnification power of the telescope to the night sky. And
he also, using his engineering skills, he made improvements to
the design of the primordial telescope to increase its power.

(43:57):
He eventually, I think it within just a couple of month,
he had scaled it up to twenty times magnification. Uh So,
I guess we should discuss a couple of the examples
of what Galileo saw when he looks through the telescope
and how it provided evidence that changed the dominant strains
of thinking about the universe. Now. One of his first
observations was the moon. Yeah, I mean, what that's that's

(44:19):
gonna be the first thing you're gonna look at. No
better than to look at the sun. But there's the moon.
Let's take a closer look. I mean, what's there to
learn about the moon? We can all see the moon
right like, the moon's right there. It just seems like,
what what should you be able to learn about the moon?
That would be revolutionary by looking at it in a
magnified way. But I thought this was really interesting. So
in December of sixteen o nine he observed the moon

(44:43):
through the telescope. And of course humans have been gazing
at the Moon at night for a long time, but
a common belief in the geocentric cosmology of the time
was that the moon and other objects above the lunar sphere.
This was a you know, a designation of a certain
area around the Earth in the heavens, that the stuff
in the lunar sphere and above it was perfect, which

(45:05):
would mean perfectly smooth, sort of featureless heavenly spheres. So well,
we could see patterns of changes in the coloration of
the Moon from the Earth. With the naked eye, many
imagine the Moon to be sort of like a heavenly
ball bearing. But what did Galileo see when he looked
at the moon? Well, specifically, he made observations of the

(45:28):
terminator line. This is the division between day and night
on a partially illuminated moon. So you're seeing, you know,
part of the moon is lit up by the sun
and part of it as the nighttime part of the moon,
and we're seeing that horizon of sunrise or sunset from
the Earth. If you've ever looked at this, what is
the line like, Well, of course it's jagged, and that's

(45:52):
it's jagged because the surface of the Moon is textured
with mountains and valleys and craters of different elevations which
catch the light of the sunrise or the sunset differently
and cast longer or shorter shadows. The surface of the
Moon was a terrain like the surface of the Earth,
making it seem like maybe the Moon and the Earth

(46:12):
are not actually special examples of fundamentally different universal essences
or spheres of being, but instead are similar chunks of
matter obeying the same physical laws. So in other words,
it was almost almost like we've discussed on at least
on stuff to blow your mind, like you know, older
models of the Moon as being like some sort of

(46:33):
a mirror like object or certainly here like a holy
ball bearing. And basically he's looking at the Moon and
seeing that the Moon is at least earth like on
the surface. Like it is. It is earthlike in a
not in the sense that it has trees or lie
or canals or anything, but is it the very least

(46:54):
like it's it seems to be made of a sort
of dirt or rock. It is land. Yeah, it has terrain,
it has mountains, it as craters, there's stuff going on there.
Uh So that meant, yeah, that's an interesting point of analogy.
Then I think the really big observation came with Jupiter.
So this would have been I guess just like a
month later in January of six ten, Galileo was making

(47:16):
observations of Jupiter. And to be perfectly clear, Galileo did
not discover Jupiter. We mentioned earlier that you know, the
planets up to Uranus had been known about for a
long time. They could be seen with the naked eye.
Jupiter's bright enough to see with the naked eye under
the right conditions as a point of light. So people
would have known about Jupiter since ancient times. What made

(47:37):
Galileo's observations of Jupiter special was that when viewed through
his upgraded telescope, Jupiter's sort of single point of light
became four points of light, bringing us back to the moons. Yeah, exactly,
so he saw he saw these points of light in
a straight line alongside Jupiter, like as if mounted on

(48:00):
a rod going through the equator of the greater planet.
So first he made a note and decided, Okay, I
guess maybe these are stars, but I'll come back and
check later. And if they were background stars, by the
time he came back to check again later, they should
have moved along with the rest of the background starfield,
you know, because Jupiter would be closer and it's moving along, uh,

(48:20):
you know, independent of the stars. But instead he found
that these other stars stuck to Jupiter like glue, and
that also they moved, They moved back and forth as
if along this rod, stringing them to the planet. And
later he discovered that there was a fourth star in
in this line along with Jupiter, in addition to the
three had already seen this naturally suggested a radical conclusion,

(48:46):
which is that Jupiter has satellites, and we now know these, Yes,
the Galilean moons of Jupiter. We did a whole episode
of stuff to blow your mind about them. It's io Ganymede,
Europa and Callisto, and these are moons. But what was
undeniable at the time was that this other planet had
satellites orbiting it the same way that Earth did, the

(49:07):
same way the Earth has a moon, Jupiter has moons.
So if there were moons orbiting Jupiter, then it's really
hard to keep swinging your sword for the cosmological uniqueness
of Earth in the geocentric model. Like, it's clear evidence
that there is at least one other center of motion
in the universe, and it's Jupiter. And if Jupiter can

(49:28):
be a center of motion, why can't the Sun be
a center of motion? Right? It ultimately ends up simplifying
your attempts to get a grasp on, you know, the
celestial mechanics of your immediate neighborhood. Yeah. Now, like with
the invention of the telescope, the credit for the discovery
of the moons of Jupiter, I think is also somewhat
historically disputed. I've read there's there's some attempts to credit

(49:51):
the German astronomer Simon Marius, who I think has also
been credited as maybe a sort of inventor of the telescope. Um.
It's it's also and suggested that the ancient Chinese astronomer
Gone Day might have seen one of the moons of Jupiter,
or seeing the moons of Jupiter when he described in
the fourth century b c. E. Having seen a small

(50:11):
object next to Jupiter. Uh. And and technically, I think
if the conditions are just right, it's kind of like
with seeing Uranus. Right, like, if it's just right, you
might be able to make out the moons of Jupiter
with the naked eye. But it's it's tough, it's it's
hard to do. But with the telescope it becomes predictable.
You know that you can point the telescope at Jupiter

(50:34):
and see these bodies. It's not like, you know, it's
glimpsing something that may or may not be there. Of
course that you know, that's still that becomes an issue
with the telescope and astronomy in general. Uh. You know,
in the period to follow we've discussed that on our
shows before as well. Yeah, yeah, and so Galileo's progress
in astronomy and physics, I think it helped pave the

(50:54):
way for the revolutionary work of other scientists like Isaac Newton,
you know, who picked up the tour which of this
idea of the uniformity of physical laws, showing that one
thing Newton showed was the same physical laws that governed
the path of a cannonball on Earth also governed the
motions of the planets and the comets, right universal gravitation.
That that's the big Newtonian breakthrough. There's no special physics

(51:18):
or special essences for the heavens. It's just matter and
energy obeying the same underlying laws of physics. And I
think the telescope was what allowed the empirical observations that
gave way to that way of seeing the world. It
made it possible. The telescope showed us that up there
was like down here, and it could be understood now.

(51:38):
The telescope in the microscope are are like we said,
are their twin technologies in many ways, and they have
I think together lead to changes that have drastically changed
our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Um I
always come back to the wonderful documentary short The Powers
of Ten by Charles and ray Eames from seven. It's great, Yeah,

(51:58):
it's it's readily available on YouTube. So if you have
not seen it, go watch it now. Uh, and you know,
stop listening to this podcast, go watch Powers of Ten
and come back, because says even today, you know, it
effectively conveys the scale of the physical universe via orders
of magnitude. And these technologies, the telescope and the microscope,
they've enabled us to begin a journey both inward and outward.

(52:21):
And while you know, we might have thought, you know,
previously you could essentially like hold up at a telescope
and you'd be able to, you know, glimpse the barricades
of heaven, the limits of of the universe. But it's
but what's been more amazing is that we've either the
absence of those barriers are our inability to glimpse such
limits on a cosmos that's utterly on a scale beyond

(52:42):
anything we've evolved to comprehend. Modern astronomy is is entirely
dependent though upon this technological logical step, the invention of
the telescope. Now we've gone a long way, since the
simple glass refraction telescope, which you know, bent light through
a transparent medium. Even optical telescopes now that are just
using visible light tend to be more on the basis

(53:05):
of mirrors because it's easier to magnify more that way.
It's a reflection instead of refraction. But there are also
tons of other types of telescopes that aren't even looking
at visible light anymore, right, I mean, you've got radio telescopes,
X ray telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, cosmic ray telescopes. You know,
there's a tremendous amount of human achievement in space exploration

(53:25):
that you can lump under the legacy column for the telescope. Again,
it's just really hard to overstate the importance of this invention.
But then there are also a number of telescope based
technologies and gadgets to consider that there may be a
little more, you know, rooted in terrestrial existence. Considered the sextant,

(53:46):
for example, which depends on a telescope and enabled navigators
to measure the angle between an astronomical object and the horizon,
a key for celestial navigation and see. Another is the theodolite. Uh,
this is an optical instrument that is used to measure
angles between points. And you've all seen this before, uh

(54:08):
probably driving around watching surveyors at work. Is used in surveying,
is used in construction, also used in meteorology and rocketry.
But it would not be possible without basic telescope technology
and uh on. On a much lesser note, or maybe
not a lesser note, the telescope is also a predecessor
to the kaleidoscope, which you know, it's a fun get

(54:29):
that I actually would wouldn't mind doing a whole episode on.
But it was invented in the early nineteenth century by
the Scottish scientist David Brewster, a noted optics expert himself,
who also invented and improved uh stereoscope, you know, stereo
viewers and uh and also a binocular camera and other
optical inventions. Uh yeah. Once you start going down the

(54:52):
rabbit hole of looking at like improvements and an optical
technology and new optical technology innovations and inventions, uh, you know,
it really gets gets fascinated. Yeah yeah, and it's I mean,
the telescope. I think it would not be wrong to
say that it changed the world. I don't want to

(55:12):
put everything on the telescope and not say and say
that there were not other influences. But I think the
telescope was one of the most important things that led
to this change in our way of thinking about the universe,
that said, uh, you know that that phenomena everywhere can
be understood by appealing to universal laws and not necessarily

(55:32):
like special circumstances that that can't be understood from our
point of view. Right, Yeah, And and again it's it's
such a fascinating one too, because it's it's it's a
situation where like, you know, all the elements were there
all you know, the technology was available, and then it's
you know, looking back in retrospect, you know, we we

(55:52):
can we can look at the timeline and say, like,
you know, who's gonna do it? Why? Why have they
not invented it yet? Why is the telescope not changing
the world yet? And then the moment occurs, and uh,
and the world changes. We already mentioned this, but I
am very interested in in actually going backward in this
story to some time in the future, come back to
earlier moments of breakthroughs in optics and refraction lenses, the

(56:18):
creation of spectacles, for example, spectacles is a key one.
Now we have done a previous episode on sunglasses. Yeah, so,
which gets a little bit into the the into the
spectacles area, but not completely. Oh, I should have mentioned this.
I can't believe I forgot when we're talking about Giovanni
Della Giovanni Batista della Porta. Uh, he apparently proposed some

(56:39):
changes I think to the camera obscura. I don't know
if he was the first person to do this, but
I think he proposed a camera obscura with a lens
on it as opposed to just depenhole. Basically, what we're
saying is it eventually on Invention we will cover the
complete history of optical technology because there's a lot. There's
a lot kind of Again, it comes back to what

(57:00):
we are and such. We're such highly visual creatures that
optical technology is of course groundbreaking. It is of course
world changing, be it the way the motion picture changed
the world or the way that the telescope change the world. Yeah.
I'm also feeling a little bit of regret that we maybe,
maybe in this episode we went too far with the

(57:21):
egg based cryptography and and barred ourselves the opportunity to
do a whole episode on egg based cryptography in the future.
I don't know, there could be more. I don't know.
This is my my introduction to egg based cryptography. So well,
perhaps there's there's a whole episode's worth of additional data
out there we should consider. We're just egg technology in general, right,

(57:43):
Who invented that wire slicer thing for your hard boiled eggs? Oh?
You know this is actually you bringing this up. Unitaskers
is the term that sometimes use for kitchen devices like
this Brown. I don't know if, but he uses it
all the time. He loathes unitaskers. Uh, you know, it

(58:04):
depends on the un task or some of them. I love.
But I would actually love to do an episode where
we just look at different unitasker devices, you know, because
those are kind of like the ultimate and invention right
where you have you've, you've you've come up with with
with this device that doesn't really change the world. What
changes the world in very small and specific ways, such

(58:26):
as cutting down the time it takes to slice a
boiled egg into several pieces, not just cutting down the time,
also ensuring regularity in the word of slices. Yeah, I'm
also generally against unitaskers, but there are a few I
can probably think of that I get into every time
I use a spatula, I I wonder, like, what is
the like the full history of the spatulate? How did

(58:46):
we get to this point? And then I forget to
look into it afterwards. No, yeah, the differences the history
of cooking culture is really interesting, like like using chopsticks
to cook versus using them to eat. You know, yeah, yeah,
that was previous episode of Invention. All right, So as
as you can tell, we're open to all manner of
subjects here on Invention, and we would love to hear

(59:07):
from you if you have any particular request. If there's
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(59:27):
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(59:48):
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