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 CHAPTER VII THE GREAT TELESCOPE

There is reason to believe that the discoverer of the telescope was Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century also invented gunpowder, and was rewarded with the curses of the Church, the reproaches of his fellow-friars, and the terror of the ignorant as a wonder-worker by the aid of evil arts. His discovery of how to see to a greater distance than the eye can reach, was a seed that died in the ground, and did not come to life again till the world was more than three centuries older. A spectacle-maker of Leyden, Lippershey, working among lenses, as the glasses of spectacles are called, chanced to place two of them so that, in looking through, he saw a distant church spire as if it were close at hand. He made the story public in 1609. Galileo, who happened to be then in Venice, between which and Holland the East India traffic still continued, and gave rise to a considerable commerce, heard the story, probably from some merchant, and, instead of turning it into ridicule as many would have done, set himself to find out if he could not do what a humble spectacle-maker on the other side of Europe had already done. He was successful. He brought the moon and the planets so much nearer to the earth that astronomy took its place among the sciences.