Hans lipperhey

Hans Lipperhey was born in Wesel (western Germany) and settled in Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, the southwesternmostprovince of the Netherlands, where he married in 1594 and became a citizen in 1602. His craft was that of spectacle-maker.Middelburg was a flourishing city, especially after the fall of Antwerp to the Spanish in 1585, which caused many of itsProtestant inhabitants to flee north to the Netherlands.

New glass-making techniques were introduced here by Italians in the 1590s, and perhaps some ideas about combining lenses wereabroad in this glass-making community. Although others have claimed the invention of the telescope and the device was impossible to keep secret, the earliest record of the existence of such adevice is a letter of the government of Zeeland to its delegation to the States General of the Netherlands, dated 25September 1608, which instructs them to be of help to the bearer, "who claims to have a certain device by means of whichall things at a very great distance can be seen as if they were nearby, by looking through glasses which he claims to be a newinvention."

Shortly after that, the States General were also petitioned by Jacob Metius of Alkmaar, a city in the north of the Netherlands,who also claimed to be the inventor. The claim of yet a third person, Sacharias Janssen, also a spectacle-maker in Middelburg,emerged several decades later. The surviving records are not sufficient to decide who was the actual (or as it was put in theseventeenth century, the first) inventor of the telescope. All we can say is that Lipperhey's patent application is theearliest record of an actually existing telescope.