Um, not to accuse you of anything like Eurocentrism, or anything tediously PC like that, Cecil, but what do you think is the likelyhood that the telescope hadn’t been invented somewhere in the world by the 16th century? You don’t suppose those clever Arabs might have had that particular trick up their sleeve, what with their sophisticated understanding of optics? Perhaps you meant that the telescope was not yet in existence in Europe…?
Link to column being referenced: Tycho Brahe – CKDH
[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 04-17-2001 at 07:12 AM]
Right on! And why stop at the telescope? Are we to believe that the electric light went uninvented until the early 1900s? Isn’t it far more likely that someone in some tribe in middle-Asia invented the electric light back in the Dark Ages (when they really needed the light), but just didn’t tell anyone about it?
Bah.
No speculation: evidence. You find proof that some African tribesperson invented a telescope, and let us know about it, and you’ve got an argument. Otherwise, you might as well start up a protest group that we rename the term “watt” after some unknown but very clever Aztec.
The winners write history, and history says that the telescope was not invented yet. But if you’ve got a cite for the Arab invention of the telescope prior to the 16th century, by all means, trot it out.
Welcome to the SDMB, and thank you for posting your comment.
Please include a link to Cecil’s column if it’s on the straight dope web site.
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Cecil’s column can be found on-line at the link provided by C K Dexter Haven and Duck Duck Goose.
Perhaps a bit of clarification is in order: There were, indeed, devices at that time which could be described as telescopes: Heck, even a single lens could qualify for that. However, at the time that Tycho was doing his observations, nobody in the world had yet thought to use such a device to study the heavens-- That innovation was due to Galileo, just after Tycho’s time (hence also the misconception that Galileo invented the telescope). The device existed, but it wasn’t a tool of astronomy.
And then we have a verifiable fact: the first telescope was invented in ancient Egypt by a guy named Apotomax (or perhaps Cheoses, the hieroglyph is unclear) who used up the last pice of toilet paper on the roll, stared at the tube, and then held the empty cardboard roll up to his eye and looked at the stars! (emphasis mine.) Thus, the first telescope was invented. This was in 2472 BC, on March 23, and is well documented in tomb paintings; also, my Aunt Mooney told me about it and she would never lie.
Take that, all you Euro-centric snobs! Europe has never invented anything nor contributed anything to the growth of civilization, except arguably Monty Python.
FWIW, I once read a book of scientific achievements by medieval rabbis, and one of them talks of a tube used for viewing things that sounds very much like a telescope. I don’t recall the book or the rabbi, and the description is sufficiently vague so that it doesn’t really prove anything. But it’s certainly possible. Eyeglasses existed long before Hans Lipperschey and his compatriots first recorded their use of a telescope. I’d be very surprised if some eyeglass manufacturer didn’t try screwing around with the lenses and noticed that if you separate two by the right distance (the sum of the focal lengths) you got a magnified image. (If he used two identical lenses, though, he wouldn’t be impressed – the magnification would be one.)
The awful Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood shows Costner’s RH being amazed by the leather-and-glass telescope his Moorish companion produces, well before the acknowledged invention of the telescope. I can easily see this kind of invention happening and being lost. Probably several times. (KC seems to like the image – he has something similar in Dances with Wolves)
Nevertheless, although we have optical writings spanning millennia, it has to be noted that nothing indisputably resembling a telescope shows up in any of this until the sixteenth century.
<Take that, all you Euro-centric snobs! Europe has never invented anything nor contributed anything to the growth of civilization, except arguably Monty Python.>
I don’t really have anything factual to add, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen a Kevin Costner movie offered as a research citation, even an only semi-serious one.
Next up, my explanation of how a volcano could form in downtown Los Angeles.
I used to work at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and their Africa exhibit (opened 1993) claimed Columbus sailed to the New World, using a telescope invented by African Arabs. Putting aside for the moment that questionable racial categorization (just because an African is Muslim doesn’t make them ethnically Semetic, guys), we still have the fact that Columbus sailed some 72 years before Galileo was even born. Of course, by the time I’d noticed the error all the people who’d worked on the exhibit had left; the new Africanist curatormuttered something inconclusive about being unable to prove a negative (like that’s a valid criterion for publishing something), and, like most museums, the Field had no mechanism for altering or updating exhibits once they were open. As far as I know, it’s still there.
– beruang
“One thought driven home is better than three left on base.” James Liter
Or was it someone different? Whoever it was, my guess would be that the Field Museum thinks they can make a case for at least the possibility of a pre-Galileo telescope.
…
Translation: “go away, you inconvenient member of the public who is asking me an embarrassing question.”
Alternate translation: “It’s my exhibit, dammit, and if I prefer to believe that Columbus might have had an Arab telescope, it’s none of your business, you inconvenient member of the public.”
Well, I’ve never actually worked at the Field Museum of Natural History, but I have had experience with small local museums, and my experience is that if you catch them with a glaring anachronism or outright error, they’re mighty quick to unlock the case and get the durn thing out of there before somebody else sees it. So, like I said, they probably think they can make a case for an Arab telescope.
thus Duck Duck Goose inadvertently complies with Duck Duck Goose’s request for a cite proving the Arabs invented the telescope prior to the 16th century
And, Cecil? I think Fitz just made a convert. Wanna think about revising the column?
Alhazen (Al-Hazen, al-Haytham, transliterations vary) also was a noted astronomer, publishing a few treatises on meteors, and pointing out errors in Ptolemy’s model of planetary orbits.
It seems likely that someone whose time was spent between studying the optical properties of lenses and orbital mechanics may have, at some point, used a combination of lenses to look up into the heavens.
There are a LOT of works by Arabic scientists on optics and astronomy. There are two whose work on the rainbow predates Theodoric of Freibourg’s astonishingly early work. The Arab scientists had twenty-barreled names that I can’t recall, except in the abbreviated forms of ** el Shirazi** and ** el Farisi**.One of these gentlemen made the first experimental observation of the tertiary rainbow. Their work is truly impressive. Nevertheless, there’s no clear record of any telescope. This seems very odd, but either no Arabic scientist discovered the principle of the telescope, or else they kept it very well hushed up.
I can recommend the book ‘The Crystal Sun’, by Robert Temple, for anyone interested in optical technology before the 16th century. Temple’s a bit on the wack side, as an author, but his research and arguments in this book generally seem pretty solid. And it’s got pretty pictures.
