🔭 October 2, 1608 — Johannes Lippershey applied for a patent for an "instrument for seeing at a distance," which is believed to have inspired Galileo himself. This application became the first known recorded mention of a telescope prototype.

According to legend, Lippershey got the idea from children playing with lenses in his shop. He overheard them discussing how, when looking through two lenses, the weather vane on a nearby roof appeared much closer, and he set out to invent his device. Other versions claim Lippershey simply heard rumors about similar instruments or even took credit for his assistant's work.

One way or another, in 1608, Lippershey assembled the first trial model. The instrument consisted either of two convex lenses (producing an inverted image) or a convex objective and a concave eyepiece (producing a normal image) – historians still aren’t entirely sure. Lippershey’s "telescope" provided threefold magnification, and during its first demonstration in September of the same year, it was used to observe ships from several kilometers away.

Lippershey received a substantial monetary reward from the Dutch government and an offer to manufacture binoculars with similar characteristics. However, the patent he requested was never granted, as several others, including Jacob Metius (who applied just two weeks after Lippershey) and Zacharias Janssen, another optician from Middelburg, were already working on similar devices. Moreover, the instrument was relatively easy to reproduce based on verbal descriptions.

According to one version, in 1609, the so-called Lippershey telescope caught the attention of Jacques Bovedère, a French assistant to Galileo Galilei. Jacques sent his mentor a letter describing it, and Galileo immediately began constructing his own version, despite never having seen the original. By the end of the year, he had developed a telescope with 20x magnification, and the Venetian Senate rewarded him with a lifelong lectureship at the University of Padua for this achievement. In Galileo’s telescope, it is known for certain that he used a convex objective and a concave eyepiece. Later, he managed to achieve a maximum magnification of over 30x.

After Galileo’s telescope appeared, the era of cosmic discoveries and the study of Earth’s surroundings began. Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and other renowned scientists refined the device, and the distant descendants of Lippershey’s telescope (X-ray, space, and others) remain the primary tools of astronomers and astrophysicists today.

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