In 1608, an eyeglass maker in the Netherlands named Hans Leipershaye attempted to patent unsuccessfully,

a design for a refracting telescope, a device that used a convex lens to collect and focus the light bouncing off an object,

the wielder wanted to view, and a concave eyepiece which then magnified that object, so it could be

seen more clearly. This early design was improved upon by Galileo, who had seen a description

of the object in question, but never got his hands on the physical product a year later. Galileo

made his own telescope, which allowed him to view distant objects,

with about three times magnification, and then eventually improved the design even further,

achieving something like 30 times magnification. His telescope, like Leipershays, though,

was riddled with flaws and imperfections

that resulted in often flipped, blurry, and distorted views of things,

distant earthly objects, in Leipershays' case, and astronomical objects like the moon for Galileo.

A few years later, Johann Kepler came up with a telescope design based on Galileo's

that he thought would provide clearer images, and Christian Hoygens was producing such telescopes,

which were much larger and less portable, but also a lot more accurate than those recent precursors at scale

by 1655.

Isaac Newton built the first practical reflector telescope in 1668, a design that used a mirror

to reflect light collected by a lens to an eyepiece, though he was far from the first person

to theorize that such a design might solve some of the problems experienced by other designs,

though he mostly built it to test a theory he had about white light being composed of a spectrum of other colors,

a theory that was ultimately proved correct,

but which in the meantime led to a new telescope design and some clever methods of shaping

and grinding mirrors that would find use in other later applications, including future telescope

...