De vero telescopii inventore, cum brevi omnium conspiciliorum historia Observationum microcospicarum centuria

BOREL, Pierre

Published by Adriaan Vlacq, The Hague, 1655

About this Item

HISTORY OF THE TELESCOPE AND HUYGENS SATURNIAN DISCOVERIES . First edition, very rare and a fine copy. "In 1656 French physician, chemist, botanist, and savant Pierre Borel published the first documentary history of the invention of the telescope and microscope in De vero telescopii inventore … in The Hague. Borel s work also contained Christiaan Huygens s preliminary announcement of his discovery of the rings of Saturn and of the Saturnian moon Titan. Borel s purpose in compiling his history was to publish the evidence obtained by William Boreel, French ambassador to the Dutch States, supporting the claims of Dutch spectacle-maker Zacharias Jansen to the invention of both the telescope and compound microscope. Jansen s first claim is not generally recognized (German-Dutch lens-maker Hans Lippershey is traditionally credited with inventing the first telescope), but Jansen probably did invent the compound microscope, the original of which Boreel saw in 1619. One of the several documents that Borel collected for his history was a letter from Christiaan Huygens entitled De Saturni luna observatio nova, dated March 5, 1656, recounting his discovery of the Saturnian moon Titan and giving in anagram form his solution to the problem of the mysterious variable arms of Saturn. Huygens had concluded that the arms were really a single ring surrounding the planet, a solution that, three years later, he announced in Systema Saturnium. By publication of the anagram he was able to establish his priority before full disclosure of the discovery" (). Borel, physician to the King of France, was an active collector of rarities, plants, antiquities, and minerals, as well as manuscripts and books of the Hermetic philosophers or chemists. In this work he gives a detailed history of the telescope from the earliest times up to Galileo, Descartes, Metius and numerous others. Borel was the first to apply microscopy to medicine, and the second part of the book is devoted to microscopic observations. It also gives a full account of the construction of telescopes and microscopes and discusses ways to grind lenses for both these instruments. "He also describes a polemoscope [periscope], a 1637 invention designed for looking around corners, which is particularly useful in warfare" (DSB). The third part was completed slightly later than the first two and was not included in the first copies issued (see below). ABPC/RBH list three complete copies in the last 40 years. "The search for the inventor of the telescope has a long tradition which began almost immediately after the invention of the instrument. In Telescopium, the earliest book on the telescope, published in 1618, but composed in 1612, Girolamo Sirtori already doubts whether Hans Lipperhey, the first demonstrator of the instrument, was also the inventor of the device … Since then, the search for the inventor of the telescope has continued unabated. One of the most famous and early examples of the genre is Pierre Borel s De Vero Telescopii Inventore (1656), or the true inventor of the telescope " (Van Helden, Origins, p. 2). "Sirtori himself downplayed the achievement of the invention by presenting the story of Johannes Lippersein [Lipperhey], who would have grasped the idea from a genius or some other man, as yet unknown, of the race of Hollanders, who had visited this Middelburg spectacle maker. This visitor supposedly ordered many lenses to be made, concave as well as convex. When he returned, the man selected and aligned two lenses, a concave and a convex one, and in this way inadvertently revealed the secret of the telescope. Lipperhey by no means devoid of ingenuity, and curious about the novelty would have imitated the visitor, and after having joined both lenses in a tube, rushed to the Hague, to the court of Count Maurits, to show him the invention" (Zuidervaart, p. 19). In the Netherlands, an alternative first inventor began to emerge Jacob Adriaensz Metius, the brother. Seller Inventory # 5415

Bibliographic Details

Title: De vero telescopii inventore, cum brevi ...

Publisher: Adriaan Vlacq, The Hague

Publication Date: 1655

Edition: First edition.