Corporate Video Production Sydney: When was it invented, the little piece of glass that would change the world? No one knows for sure.
The Lens When was it invented, the little piece of glass that would change the world? No one knows for sure. By Peter Hennig In Ancient China, Greece, and Rome, they probably used ‘magnifying-stones’ of polished rock crystal, but it was not until about 1000 that the principles of the lens were properly described by an Arabic physicist, Ibn el-Haitam. His was not only the first correct account of how light is refracted by a lens, but also of how the eye functions in principle.
Corporate Video Production Sydney: The Microscope and the Telescope
By the end of the sixteenth century it was known how a microscope worked. The basic model consisted of two positive lenses at a certain distance from each other, the one in front being small and strongly magnifying. It is a design that is not difficult to come up with if you sit experimenting with different lenses. Nor was the microscope seen as having any great significance to begin with. It was a curiosity that might entertain for a while, a ‘flea-glass’ that could turn the tiniest insect into terrible monster.
Even the telescope may have been discovered more or less by chance, although one version of the story credits its inventor with a more deliberate approach. It is said that in 1608 a Dutch lens maker, Hans Lippershey, received an order for two lenses. One was to be slightly larger and weakly convergent, the other to be smaller and concave, in other words a diverging lens. When the customer came to collect them, he held the lenses at arms’ length from each other, smiled happily, paid, and left.
Corporate Video Production Sydney: Galileo
Lippershey was perplexed, and found no peace until he had cut two more lenses so that he could see what was going on for himself. To his amazement he found that a distant church tower appeared so close that he could see the weather vane quite clearly. News of the invention spread quickly, and only a short time later in Italy, Galileo Galilei began his pioneering study of celestial bodies.
