Van Helden A., Dupré S., van Gent R., Zuidervaart H. (eds.) The Origins of the Telescope

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010. — 368 p. — (History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands 12). — ISBN: 9789089646156, 9089646159.The origins of the telescope have been debated since the instrument's appearance in the Hague in 1608. Civic and national pride has led local dignitaries, popular writers, and scholars to present sharply divergent histories over the years, crediting a variety of people and places with the invention. Drawing on newly discovered documents, re-examined records, and tests of early lenses and telescopes, this fascinating study proposes a new and convincing account of the origins of the instrument that changed mankind's vision of the universe.Huib J. Zuidervaart. Thee ‘true inventor’ of the telescope. A survey of 400 years of debate.
Klaas van Berkel. The city of Middelburg, cradle of the telescope.
Rienk Vermij. The telescope at the court of the stadtholder Maurits.
Rolf Willach. The long road to the invention of the telescope.
Katrien Vanagt. Suspicious spectacles. Medical perspectives on eyeglasses, the case of Hieronymus Mercurialis.
Sven Dupré. William Bourne’s invention. Projecting a telescope and optical speculation in Elizabethan England.
A. Mark Smith. Alhacen and Kepler and the origins of modern lens-theory.
Eileen Reeves. Complete inventions: The mirror and the telescope.
Albert Van Helden. Galileo and the telescope.
Mario Biagioli. Did Galileo copy the telescope? A ‘new’ letter by Paolo Sarpi.
Marvin Bolt & Michael Korey. The world’s oldest surviving telescopes.
Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis. Labour on lenses: Isaac Beeckman’s notes on lens making.
Giuseppe Molesini. Testing telescope optics of seventeenth-century Italy.
Antoni Malet. Kepler’s legacy: telescopes and geometrical optics, 1611-1669.
Henk Zoomers. The Netherlands, Siam and the telescope. The first Asian encounter with a Dutch invention.
Albert Clement. Music as a liberal art and the invention of the telescope.