A Brief History of the Astronomical Telescope IV: Did Leonardo Invent the Telescope 100 Years Before Galileo?
“If you were standing on the moon or on a star, our earth would seem to reflect the sun as the moon does.”
. — Leonardo
This is the fourth and final installment on the invention of the astronomical telescope. For me, helping to establish the provenance of the astronomical telescope has been an exciting personal adventure, paralleling many of my achievements in the classroom as a professor of physics and researcher, although my contribution is small.
Wearing my dual caps of artist and scientist, a few years ago I published a book entitled, Math and the Mona Lisa: the Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci (Smithsonian Books, 2004), and five years later a second book, Leonardo’s Universe (National Geographic Books, 2009). A year after the release of the first book, in 2005 I gave a lecture at the Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology, PICMET ‘05, in Portland, Oregon. There, I mentioned, among a host of innovations that Leonardo had introduced in his art and science, the existence of tantalizing evidence of the design of astronomical telescopes — both reflecting and refracting, but most likely as “mental inventions.” But, I did speculate that Leonardo may just have created an instrument he pointed at the night sky. The time would have been the turn of the 16th century, almost a hundred years before Galileo. Ironically, the year 2009 was celebrated as the ‘Year of Astronomy,’ commemorating the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s epochal invention in 1609 that revolutionized astronomy.
I had based my original hypothesis on some of Leonardo’s diagrams in optics, specifically his study of reflections from curved surfaces and a number of quotes from his Codices. Also for an exhibition in Virginia in 2002 celebrating the 550th Anniversary of Leonardo’s birth, I had collaborated with the late art historian Thomas Somma in organizing the event, “Leonardo — Artist, Scientist, Inventor.” Along with replicas of Leonardo’s inventions, we had selected a copy of one of Leonardo’s drawings, that subsequently appeared on the dust jacket of my book. At the opening of the exhibition, I showed the drawing to two physicist friends, Prof. Norman Ramsey of Harvard and Dr. William D. Phillips of NIST, both uncommonly gifted scientists, both Nobel Prize Winners in Physics. I remember that they were awe struck in seeing the drawing, one of them even exclaiming, “That’s the telescope!”
In Math and the Mona Lisa, I had quoted Leonardo’s words, “In order to observe the nature of the planets, open the roof and bring the image of a single planet onto the base of a concave mirror. The image of the planet reflected by the base will show the surface of the planet much magnified” (Codex Arundel, c. 1513)
André Buys, Pretoria, SA. (Photo by the author, July 2010)
Unbeknownst to me in the 2005 PICMET talk, André Buys was in the audience. A professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, Buys was a nuclear engineer, and an avid amateur telescope maker. In the following two years Dr. Buys delved deeply into Leonardo’s surviving codices, and even built a replica of an instrument that I had speculated was Leonardo’s design for a reflecting telescope. Buys’s research goes a long way toward establishing the validity of the conjecture, and is far more important in establishing the primacy of the invention than my efforts had been.
I ran into André Buys again in 2010 at PICMET ‘10, but this time in the exotic venue of Phuket, Thailand. The morning preceding my keynote talk, we spent almost two hours reviewing the slides in his Power Point Presentation, a presentation initially created for a meeting of the Pretoria Centre of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa in May 2007. It was immensely gratifying to have the private presentation, and many of Dr. Buys’s slides have been integrated into this blog.
Dr. Buys included in his history of the telescope, the basic design of telescopes, including the two reflectors, Isa