Invention Playlist: The Telescope

and they are never violated. Right. Yeah, it would be um, it would be catastrophic if science changed from say country to country or county to county. Right, you go across the state line and you fall upright. Yeah. So water boils at a hundred degrees celsius or two twelve fahrenheit in my kitchen, it should also boil at the same temperature in my bedroom, or in the kitchen of the white castle down the street, or a hundred miles away

in a different town. Right now. You might interrupt there and say, oh, but actually water sometimes does boil at a different temperature, right, Like at high elevations, uh, where atmospheric pressure is lower, it's easier for water to boil because there's less pressure pressing down on the water, so it actually does boil at a lower temperature, like at three thousand meters, water boils at more like nine d

degrees celsius. And in fact, Robert, I don't know if you've ever read these, there are great stories that take this to the extreme. Did you know about the unbearable sadness of boiling potatoes on Mount Everest? So there are these stories about mountaineers trying to cook on Mount Everest and they would boil potatoes in a pot of water to eat them, but they boil them and they boil them and boil them for hours and hours, and after

hours of cooking, the potatoes were still basically raw. And the problem is on Mount Everest that you're up so high that the boiling point is so low. The boiling water in the pot is not hot enough to cook potatoes. It's like sort of like trying to cook them in hot tap water even though it's boiling. It's a In fact, I would say it's actually like an inverse pressure cooker, right, you know, pressure cooker allows your food to get hotter because of the increased pressure going up on Mount Everest.

And trying to cook something is like doing the opposite. But actually, you know, there, we've not discovered an absence of an underlying law just because water boils at a different temperature at different elevations. What we've actually discovered is a deeper underlying law that the boiling point of a liquid varies along with pressure, and that that relationship is mathematically deterministic. And I would say this is the assumption that pretty much guides almost all of applied science in

the world today. It's the idea that the laws of physics are out there and they don't change or very depending on special cases or where you are. But how do we know that conditions on the Earth and the Moon might be different, but that the underlying physical laws that give rise to those conditions are exactly the same. And maybe one thing that's important to point out in understanding this is that people haven't always thought this way.

There is a powerful tradition, going back into the ancient world, sort of viewing the behaviors of things in reality as a large collection of special cases, governed by their own special essences and and by by special circumstances, maybe like divine intervention, maybe like some types of magic, maybe just by you know, the essence of the way a person falls is different than the way a planet falls, because a planet is a different thing than a person, And so you you'd end up with the idea that the

heavens are not subject to the same physical forces as the Earth. And we see this all throughout ancient cosmology, just thinking that there are different different laws applying to different places and circumstances in the universe. Now, on one hand, you could argue that, well, we don't really know that physical laws are the same everywhere, right, and and that's kind of true, like at the very edges of our understanding.

There could be ways of arguing that physical laws aren't really laws, you know, maybe they're just generalizations we make based on observation, or maybe there could be cosmological scenarios when they're different. You know, maybe in the beginning of the universe the laws were different or could have been different.

But for the most purposes in the present, that assumption that the physical laws are the same everywhere has proven extremely useful and generating accurate scientific theories that make correct predictions and create powerful technology. So I wanted to think about at the beginning of today. Where did this assumption of the uniformity of physical laws come from? How did we end up thinking this way about the world, that there's just sort of like a set of underlying ways

that things work and that that governs everything. Well, as the title of the show indicates, we're going to tie it to an invention, you're exactly right now, we don't want to tie it entirely to this invention, because there are a bunch of different strains of thinking throughout history that I think have contributed to this way of seeing

the world that we generally share now. But I believe one really powerful moment of transition here was centered around a particular piece of technology, and that technology is the subject of today's episode, which is the telescope. Yes, more specifically the optical telescope. Right now, we're just doing one episode today here, so we're not going to be able

to focus on all the different kinds of telescopes. We may come back to them in the future, but we're gonna be focusing on specifically the earliest optical refracting telescopes, right and uh, and yeah, it's really it really is kind of hard to to overstate the importance of the telescope in the history of science and in the history of our understanding of the cosmos. Yeah, there's a great quote about the invention from the Invention of the Telescope

by Albert van Helden. From van Helden writes, quote, among the scientific instruments which have played an important role in the growth of man's knowledge of the world around him, the telescope occupies a position of historic pre eminence, rivaled only by the microscope, which was a natural outgrowth of

the telescope. In a real sense, the telescope can be considered the prototype of modern scientific instruments, and learned men in the seventeenth century, the first century of its existence, were acutely aware of its important role in the formation of a new astronomy. Yeah, and some of the earliest accounts of what was viewed through the very first telescopes. You can you can kind of feel the electricity coming off of the writing, right, like, like the excitement with

seeing stuff that not just seeing new things. I mean we still see new things in the heavens that people have never seen before. Just this year there was the very first direct imaging of a black hole, not using an optical telescope, but but using you know, a form of magnifying the heavens. And that was astonishing because we

were looking at something we've never seen before. But as amazing as that was, what if instead of just seeing a new thing, you were able to see the universe in a completely different way that now, for the first time, you can look at really anything beyond the moon as more than a point of light. Yeah, it's really I mean it's really hard to avoid optical metaphors for this

optical technology. Like I want to think, it's like it's like being able having poor eyesight your entire life and then finally putting on a pair of glasses and seeing things come into sharper detail, you know, solidifying things that you suspected already, but also bringing you know, fine print into view that was invisible to you previously. That sort of thing. Yeah, And I think that's another reason why the telescope is such. Um, you know, a major invention

is that we are predominantly, you know, optical beings. We depend so much on our sense of sight, and this so greatly improved our ability to do optically see things. Well. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's worth thinking about is the very idea that that we could even view the heavens with a with a viewing instrument, you know, with a magnification device that's entirely contingent on the details of life

on planet Earth. If you go to another planet where maybe life forms evolved at the bottom of an ocean around geothermal vents or growing off of some kind of like you know, chemosynthesis process in a clouded, hazy atmosphere like that of Venus or that of Titan, where you just can't you can't see the guy. I mean, there's no reason we had to evolve on a planet where you could look at the stars every night, but somehow we did. And of course those stars have always intrigued us.

I mean, human history is a story of of people's looking to the heavens and trying to figure out what is going on up there. Yeah, and that's a great point we should start with, which is that astronomy did not begin with the telescope. Astronomy long predates the telescope. There is a vast tradition of naked eye astronomy going back in ancient history, and sometimes it's astonishing what ancient

and medieval astronomers could figure out. It could discuss ever without optical telescopes, just using the naked eye, sometimes maybe in conjunction with other primitive tools like measuring instruments or something. I mean, for starters, like other planets were known before before the telescope. Right, Oh yeah, a Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are all observable with the naked eye. Uh, Uranus and Neptune are generally considered to be only visible

via the telescope with with an asterix there. Yeah, Uranus is uranus. We always fight about how to pronounce this Urinus. Let's say, Uranus is technically I think visible with the naked eye under extremely favorable conditions, but it's very, very faint. It was officially usually recognized as being discovered by William

Herschel in Sight one with the telescope. Of course, telescopes had been around for a good long while in Sight one, but it had probably been observed by others in centuries past who thought it was some kind of faint star, just barely visible. Herschel actually initially thought Uranus was a comet. On our other podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we we've been kind of considering the different planets and there

in their their their moons. From time to time, we really we really need to go to look at the outer planets a little more. Oh yeah, I wonder if there's there's much to say there. I feel like the really sexy moons show up around Saturn and Jupiter. Like on Jupiter you've got Europa, which is everybody's favorite to find some potential life at because they think their oceans underneath the icy crust. And then you've got Io, which is just a wonderful yellow hell of volcanoes and sulfur

and all that great stuff. And then around Saturn, of course you've got Titan, which is an intriguing mystery. I'm not aware of anything like that going on with Neptune or Uranus, but maybe I haven't given them a fair ship. I mean, the planets themselves, I think would be would be good topics, you know, uh, just so we can say that we have covered all of them, uh you know, just in time to have to like update with new

information for all of Oh yeah, well I can't. We'll do We'll do an episode on Uranus just so we can pronounce its seventeen different Yeah. I believe a listener provided a different pronunciation recently, didn't they we heard I think we've heard uranus. Of course, we've heard uranus. We've heard uraas uh. I think that's it for now. Well, we gotta bring you back to the telescope. Okay, So here here's a question. I wonder about how many stars

can you actually see without a telescope. I know there's got to be some general cut off point that most people aren't going to be able to see stars below a certain brightness. Yes, yeah, there's there's a there's a there's a system here for determining how visible various objects are,

and there is a ballpark number. According to astronomer dorit Hof Late of Yale University, the total number of stars in the sky that can currently be seen from both hemispheres and given optimal conditions, is nine thousand and ninety six or four thousand, five forty eight stars per hemisphere, give or take, depending on the position in the season. It's monomers use the magnitude scale to measure star and planet brightness, so the higher the number, the fainter the

object is in the sky. So the naked eye limit for most humans is six point five. Now, really bright objects actually have a negative rating on this scale. So a full moon is a negative twelve point seven highly visible, and the sun, yeah, everybody's seen this, uh, is a negative twenty six point seven. Now, I was looking at an article on this from Sky and Telescope, which is a wonderful website for anyone that's interested in astronomy, and Bob King has an article from titled nine thousand and

ninety six stars in the sky? Is that all? And and he shares the following that was just a nice quote about the visibility that this. You know, this brings up quote. While the total number of naked eye stars may seem unimpressive, consider what happens in the sky in and around cities where most of us live. From the suburbs, the magnitude limit is around plus four for a worldwide total of about nine hundred stars, or half that for

your location. If we set the city limit at magnitude plus two stars similar to the Big Dipper in brightness, we're left with just seventies stars worldwide, or thirty five stars visible from say downtown Chicago or Boston, right, because you're only ever seeing half. Yeah, that's that's a paltry number of stars. That kind of makes me hate our cities. Well, yeah, I mean, light pollution is a real detriment to uh, you know, in any kind of you know, amateur or

certainly professional astronomy. I think I've mentioned this on one of our podcasts before, and at the risk of getting sappy, I one time went to a rural area in Oregon, you know, not near any big cities, and I guess it must have been very clear and dry in the night, and and I went outside, and I remember I saw so many stars. I I felt like I was going to fall over. And it was overwhelming. How different the sky is in a really dark sky area. Oh yeah.

I had a similar experience in Georgia's own okay, Finoki Swamp, which is an area where is it's just there's no light pollution. You get out in just the midst of this enormous swamp land, and the stars are just overwhelming. Like it's no wonder that people sometimes and let's say that they've encountered a you know, they've seen a UFO in the sky. Um, because in a way it's like like seeing the cosmos like that, um, you know, unfiltered by light pollution. It it you know, it's It's almost

like seeing some sort of alien spaceship. You know, you're you're confronted with the enormity of the cosmos. It was a borderline religious experience for me. I mean it felt like it felt like a revelation. I've gone my whole life on Earth looking up at the sky at night

and never seen anything like this. Now that being said, an informed look at the skies, even from a city such as Atlanta, you can you can still have some you know, some interesting, you know, astronomical observations like it's it's it's wonderful video to be able to say, pinpoint Mars in the sky and pointed out to somebody and think about the fact that that is it. This is the planet that we've you know that do you hear about on the news that you see these this footage job.

There's so many questions have been asked about there it is in the sky, I am observing it. Oh yeah, I've I've tried to cultivate that skill before, being able to just point things out in the sky, and I've never gotten good at it. Well, the apps really help

these days. There's so many great um Star and Planet i D apps you can sort of cheat off of those and then have the experience you know, Yeah, I do like trying to find the direction of the center of the galaxy at any given time and point in the direction of Sagittary as a star, the supermassive black hole, which I know our descendants must be destined to someday just drive straight into. Now. Of course, all the stuff we were just talking about is looking up with the

naked eye with a tell us gope. Things are very different, right because they magnify light so uh so with just the original refracting optical telescope, which was just a convex lens that gathered light from a wider field, and then it was paired at a certain distance with a concave eyepiece. Uh. Galileo, when he was looking into the sky was astonished by what he saw. He wrote, I have seen stars in myriads which have never been seen before, and which surpassed

the old previously known stars in number more than ten times. Right. I mean we have to think back to that magnitude scale, you know, and the idea that suddenly, uh, cosmic bodies of a magnitude or more beyond previous human observation are now visible. Yeah, like it's it's you know, it's really crazy to imagine that. You really have to underline that statement. Yeah, and this would have been at the beginning of the

sixteen hundreds. He's using the most primitive telescopes. Now, of course we see it's funny we can look can do like a little tiny patch of the sky where before there would have been nothing, and with the powerful telescopes of today, we zoom in and see almost like ah, it's like when you you know, zoom in on water with a microscope and you see all the little bacteria living in it, except now we see galaxies full of

stars where previously we thought there was nothing. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to get to the question who invented the telescope? Where did it come from? And and more importantly, like what does it say about the time the timing of this invention? Alright, we're back.

So now we're talking about the invention of the original optical telescope, and we should start off saying at the very top that credit for the invention of the telescope is highly disputed. What counts you know, do just like descriptions written in a book count if we don't have evidence that it was actually made, what were people actually

talking about when they wrote about various kinds of magnification. Historically, credit for the invention of the telescope is most often given to a figure we're going to mention in just a minute, a Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Lipper shy or Hans lippersh lippers hay is how I've seen multiple different pronunciations. Uh so, yeah, so lippers hey, Lipper she

lippers high. We'll we'll say them all, but there are a lot of different contenders that that have competed in the minds of historians, and we won't have time to

mention them all. We will highlight a few, right, yeah, and uh yeah, it's we we really have to stress that not only it's not just one of these things where it was disputed later, where like historians are saying, actually, this person working in this other land had you know, some other ideas or seemed to have a product type and no, I mean it was disputed at the time in Lipper's own country. Yeah, and we'll touch on the

details of that. Well. I think one of the reasons that it's so disputed is that the essential technolo ology for creating the telescope had existed for a long time before anybody ever made a telescope exactly. So Leprosy lived fifteen seventy through sixteen nineteen, and it's worth noting that that here at this point in in his life, he was, of course a spectacle maker, and spectacles had been around

in Europe for at least three centuries. Uh. And I'd actually love to come back to a future episode of Invention where we'll talk about those three centuries, talk about uh, glasses, spectacles where they came from. But basically the idea is, as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and its economy rebounded from the invasions of the Dark Ages, it became increasingly beneficial to ensure that functional eyesight was maintained in

their aging scholars and scribes. So that that's why eyeglasses west by spectacles emerged really in Europe, well right, I mean, eyeglasses would be a technology that extended the working life of people who copied documents for living and because they didn't have a printing press yet in some of that time, hand copying of documents was incredibly important for preserving knowledge and spreading it. Yeah, this is the necessity in the

invention scenario here. Um. You know, eyeglasses are largely attributed to a Venetian invention, sometimes around thirteen hundred and for our fellow name of the rose Fans out there, the story of murders in a medieval abbey that they take place in thirteen seven, and their their use is certainly factors into a burn of Echo's plot. The use of spectacles. Yeah,

the main detective in the story, William of Baskerville. He has a pair of spectacles, but they're not like normal, right, It's not like, oh, you can just go get new spectacles somewhere, Like if he loses them, that's a problem. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But yeah, some three hundred years separate the birth of spectacles and ultimately the birth of the spectacle making trade. Uh from this event right where a spectacle maker takes the technology and creates tell us gop out

of it. And then the reason for creating this telescope is it turns out it's not to gaze at the heavens, but to better kill people on the battlefield. I see. So basically and this is this is the story as it specifically concerns Lippers. During the early sixteen hundreds, Dutch military reformer Prince Maurice of Nassau offered monetary rewards for any inventions that could help modernize the Dutch fighting force.

Lippers took his knowledge of spectacles and applied them to the problem, developing what he called the Looker, which he filed a patent for in six eight and their varying versions of Lippers's eureka moment ranging from him observing children playing with lenses in his shop and watching them, you know, hold one lens up and then hold the other lens

up and make objects at a distance appear closer. And then there are also just accusations that he he flat out stole the idea from someone else, and we'll get to that as well. But the question that emerges from all this is wouldn't this invention have been obvious to anyone familiar with the three hundred year old technology of spectacles. Yeah, so you've spectacles work on the principle of magnification through refraction through glass. So you've got glass as a transparent medium.

You can make a rounded edge on the outside of one of these discs of glass right like and basically it's it's all detailed in this uh, this this story of children playing with with with lenses like someone would have surely seen that before. And you know, this is ultimately exactly why the States General of the Netherlands denied his patent application, as well as the application of two other individuals, Jacob Midius, a lens maker from a family

of glass workers, and Zacharias Johnson, a spectacle maker. And they've both been proposed as the alternate inventor of the telescope, right and in other names and plots are thrown into the mix as well, and and sometimes the microscope is likewise brought up because the microscope has we already mentioned or brought up in that quote we were at it's

kind of an extension of the same technology. But when when Lippers, say, sought a thirty year patent or he also was going to settle for a yearly pension to prevent the lookers sale to rival kingdoms, the States General declared that the invention was already too widely known and too easy to copy. Still, the Prince awarded Lippers a nine florins and asked him to make the looker binocular okay for two eyes. So just not very impressed about

the telescope. Well impressed enough to pay him nine hundred florins, you know, and to and to use it. But you know, I guess you can well imagine the situation where the military uh individuals are saying, yes, this sounds great, We're gonna revolutionize everything, and then the patent office is like, okay, fine, but let's not get carried away. Let's not get this guy a patent because the the im for the knowledge

of this technology is already out there. Yeah. Now, one of the sources we were both looking at about this story of the invention of the telescope is the great uh James Burke's discussion and connections. And one of the things he does that's interesting is he connects the story of the invention of the telescope. I guess he's all

about creating connections. Uh. He connects it to the invention of the time piece, which I guess is something else going on in the Dutch economy at the time, the desire to make more accurate time pieces, because, like he writes about how the springs of low quality and the watches of the time would mean that some watches might

lose four minutes a day. Yeah, and the telescope is will probably continue to touch on here and it has this this definite relationship with precision and precision instruments of the time and those that would come afterwards. Um. But Burke also, you can, you know, makes the point here about the connection between invention and social need. While there was a social need for spectacles, which we we've already mentioned, there was not one for the telescope. And I just

want to read a quote from Connections again. Connection was both a television series but also is a is a wonderful book. Both are widely available out there. If you want to pick it out, pick it up. And if you're a fan of of this podcast and just the history of technology and inventions, you really can't go wrong

with Connections. So Burke rights quote. But there was no demand for the telescope during this period, which was prior to the invention of gunpowder and the use of the cannon on the battlefield, when the view of the universe precluded the existence of planetary bodies as three dimensional observable phenomena. This is why the moment of invention is so often identified with the moment in which the artifact comes into use.

In many cases, there are times when an invention is technologically possible and in which indeed it may appear necessary, as the telescope may have, but without a market, the idea will not sell, and in the absence of the technical and social infrastructure to support it, the invention will

not survive. This reminds me of the episode or episode I think we did a couple on the wheel, a technology that it appears within many cultures around the world for a long time, there was the perfect capability to make it and familiarity with the concept. So it's like they understood what a wheel was, and they had everything

they needed to make wheels. They just didn't make wheeled vehicles. Uh. And so the question is like, why why would you Why would you know how to do it and have everything you need to do it, but not yet do it. And Burke is pointing out that sometimes it just it does. It doesn't occur to people that there's a particular use for a thing. By the way, Burke is referring to the Western invention and use of gunpowder here, which which has a history very worthy of its own invention episode

in the future. But the short version is that the Chinese were aware of gunpowder as early as the ninth century, and there are various accounts of gunpowder in Europe going back to the hundreds. But guns would not become a military technology worthy of telescopic sites for some time basically seventeen seventy six, as I believe, and warfare itself hadn't

evolved to depend on it yet. So Burke's argument is that the technological advancements of warfare didn't reach the point uh and you know, at which this sort of lens technology promised or even uh you know, suggested a real payoff, not until the dawn of the sixteen hundreds, and so the telescope was finally borne into an age increasingly in need of long distance vision for military purposes and a

tool to star gaze beyond the limits of the human eye. Again, to Brooke's point, we can sit around all day and think of all about all the places and times it would have been useful before the seventeenth century and could have been applied. I mean, navigation seems that you know, one of the key possibilities to me, But ultimately that's just not how it came together, but camp but it

certainly did come together. And in fact, less than two years after Lip says patent Uh, an individual by the name of Galileo published a ground pay breaking treaties And will come back to Galileo in just a little bit. Yeah. Before we get to Galileo, though, we should talk about a few of the other names that have been suggested as alternate inventors of the telescope, because, as we said, there there were a bunch of people who could have been maybe given credit depending on what counts, what kind

of evidence you allow. One alternative that might not be surprising given given a lot of the optical advances that that existed in the in the Muslim world, especially in the medieval period, is that several names from the air world showed up on this list. Yeah. Yeah, for starters, Like a key individual is al Hazen, which is the Latin name for for the mathematician and astronomer Uh. Even al hatham who lived at through Tin forty h ce Um a k a Abu Ali al hatham Um is

a major figure. Particularly we have to consider his book of Optics, which dealt with magnification and refraction, and which ultimately influenced the technological traditions that would lead to the invention of the telescope. At least he wrote commentaries on Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Galen. His writings were pretty influential in the in the West at the you know, particularly among the likes of Bacon and Kepler. Uh. Quote this is from os Marshall.

Um al Hazen and the telescope. He observed the magnifying power of spheres and lenses and experimented with cylindrical, concave and parabolic metal mirrors. So basically he's a figure that some consider capable of inventing the telescope. Like if you're looking in history for you know, to pinpoint and individual who who could have very well created a telescope, Um

al Hazen is your guy. Uh. Though there is it doesn't seem to be any clear evidence that he did, but certainly all the skills were on the table some six hundred years before Galileo. Another individual in the air of world that pops up is um Taki al Din or uh Taki od Den. Muhammad had been Maroof. He was an Automan astronomer of note he lived fifty six or fifteen eighty five, so much closer to the time period we're discussing, um, you know, in in European traditions

here for the invention of the telescope. And uh, he invented a number of pumps and clocks, uh, including an astronomical clock. So again we're getting down to the technology of precision again. And he apparently described an invention that made far away objects appear closer. So it's possible that he's talking about a telescope there. It's possible that he invented a telescope in roughly fifteen seventy four, but there's

there's no clear consensus on this. But again an individual where we we can look to and say this, it's possible this individual created a telescope. And if they didn't, there's no reason why they couldn't have. You know, they had again all the tools were on the table. Uh. There There have been other suggestions of some previous figures from England, like Roger Bacon or like this guy named

Leonard Diggis who was apparently, uh, he was into surveying. Yeah, and this is to show you, just like the how how removed some of the descriptions are this was basically his son. Leonard Diggin's son wrote that he you that his father had used a proportional glass to view distant objects, and this would have been the mid fifteen hundreds, and so some historians have made a case for this, saying like this, they're talking about a telescope. This guy invented

a telescope. But we just don't have much to go on beyond that. All Right, This next guy I want to talk about is not an especially strong contender, at least I don't think so for actually having invented a telescope. I would say that the credit that is possibly given to him or was claimed by him for having invented a telescope seems to be based on some vaguely written passages about being able to see things at a distance

through through refractive lenses. But but I just wanted to talk about him because he is very weird and a fascinating figure, and the more I found out about him, the more I wanted to to go deep. His name is Giovanni Batista de la Porto or Giambatista de la Porta, an Italian natural philosopher. A minor Neapolitan noble born around fifteen thirty five died in sixteen fifteen. Sometimes depicted as something of a sorcerer, sometimes as an enthusiast of the sciences,

sometimes as a quote professor of secrets. He was most notably, I think, the author of a popular book called Magia Naturalists meaning Natural Magic, which was a sort of encyclopedia of marvels and curiosities about the world. And this book has got everything it's it encompasses everything from facts about geology and chemistry to cosmetic beauty tips. I think it's got cooking tips in it. It's got demonology and his

opinions on it, like like a cult philosophy. And then it's got this huge section on cryptography, including a whole chapter about how to send secret messages inside eggs. Well, I want to hear about these eggs. But but I do want to point out that he would have been a contemporary of John d uh the English um scientist, spy occultist who is also interested in cryptography. So uh, this was definitely a time to be into all of these things. But now, do tell me about these eggs.

Oh yeah, it sounds like a type. Yes. Sixteenth century seventeenth century type of dude who's into demonology and refraction lenses and all that. Yeah, so sending secret messages inside eggs, eggs, egg based cryptography, why eggs? Well? In Magia Naturalis, Delaporta writes that quote, because when prisons are shut, eggs are not stopped by the papal inquisition, and no fraud is suspected to be in them. Well, not until you wrote about it in your book, so he writes about this.

But yeah, the idea is that Delaporta and Medieva his friends, were targets of the Italian Inquisition, and of course the inquisitions going on at the time. Uh. And apparently while you could not pass letters to friends imprisoned by the inquisitors, at least not without those letters being read or sensored or something, you could send your friends eggs, you know, you just bring them eggs in prison. So he explains many different methods for smuggling secret messages inside eggs, including

by chemically treating the eggs. One method involves writing the message on paper. So you write out a letter and then you soften the egg shell with vinegar and you cut a tiny hole in the shell. With a knife and insert the letter written on paper into the egg, and then you put the egg in cold water to

firm up the egg again and disguise the cut. Another method involves writing the message on the shell of the egg with an ink that's like especially prepared ink made out of galls alum and pickle and whatever that means. He says, pickle and then um, and then boiling the egg. And supposedly the message will wash off of the outer shell when the egg boils, But then when the egg is peeled, the message will appear written on the egg white inside because this stuff leeches through the shell. This

is incredible. Why is this not our our easter? A messaging tradition? Yeah, that's right. The kids they go out hunting for eggs in the grass and then they pick one up that says, do not submit to the inquisitors, do not confess. Do not confess that we summoned the power of payment. But anyway, Also in Maggia Naturalis, there's a whole volume on lenses and refraction containing these vaguely written passages that mentioned, uh, you know, combining lenses and

the ability to see things across distance. This apparently led to the later misunderstanding that he may have prefigured the invention of the telescope by uh liberty or lippershy or lippers hey or however you say it, uh and the other contemporaries. But modern scholars I think, seemed to be doubtful that Delaporta was actually describing a telescope in his writings, and there's certainly no record of him making or using one, though it appears he did work with some other types

of lenses. Is more in the realm of spectacles or magnifying glass. Of course, John D is notable for having at least one lens of note that being more of a like a magical black mirror, which is which is currently I believe on display in the British Museum. Oh, I'd like to see that. Yeah, look into it if you get a chance. It's probably a mirror of some historical mischief. Yeah, with Mesoamerican origins. I believe Christian and I did a two parter on stuff to Blow your

mind about John D where we discussed the details of it. Well, I think maybe we should take a break and then we come back. We can discuss the earliest uses of the telescope. And its impact on world history. Alright, we're back. So, as we've discussed, the world was finally ready for the telescope. The technology was there, the understanding of optics, the ability to craft of the lenses, and and now you also

had the necessity the market for it. People were clamoring for it, and we had the both the military, uh, interested in the creation of telescopes. But then you had plenty of star gates. There's plenty of the astronomers who were were hungry for such a device. Yeah, I'd say that even though it was commissioned as a weapon of war, like the real bomb that it set off, was this more theological, philosophical, scientific one. And so of course we have to talk about Galileo. Now, Galileo Galilei was a

natural philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. He was the son of a cloth merchant from the city of Pisa. He lived fifteen sixty four to sixteen forty two, and he was in many ways, uh, sort of an ideal heretic, right, Like, we don't like to overplay the mythology of genius and historical inventors, but I think with Galileo, this is one case at least in my mind, where you can you can really make the case for a person who truly deserves to be thought of as a revolutionary genius who

systematically challenged scientific and philosophical misconceptions of his day with kind of mercilessly careful thought and observation, and a champion of empirical method. You know, the mindset that says, okay, if you've got an idea about how the world is in a way of looking at the world to check and see if the idea is right, you should look and check. So. Galileo is best known today for landing

a fatal blow against the theory of geocentrism. Under classic geocentric cosmology, the Earth was the center of the universe, and the Moon and the Sun and all the planets orbited around the Earth. Now again, today, we know that the Earth rotates, which is why the sky seems to spin around the Earth. But the Earth feels pretty solid, doesn't it, right, It doesn't feel like it's moving, and we can watch the sky moving all around us. So if you had to, how would you actually prove that

objects in the sky didn't orbit the Earth. Well, part of it is, of course, observe if you get to the point where you're tracking these objects that are presumably moving around the Earth, and then you begin to notice that they don't really behave like objects that are that are orbiting around something you know well, right, and that had been known for a long time, right, you know, you'd see that the planets, don't they the planets don't seem to perfectly go around the Earth in a in

a steady pattern. It's kind of odd, isn't it. Yeah, So, like closer inspection of this model of the cosmos ultimately ended up showing all these problems and the you know, the clearly showed that that our understanding was not perfect. Something was wrong with this model, right. So Galileo did not invent the theory of helio centrism, which is the idea that the Sun is the gravitational center of the

Solar system. He did not come up with that. Other thinkers had already proposed this idea for various reasons, notably the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus in uh in I believe fifteen forty three or in the fifteen forties. He lived fourteen seventy three to fifteen forty three. But Copernican heliocentrism, while it had its defenders, had not been accepted by the cat like Church, had not been accepted by the

all the academic authorities of the day. I think the reigning expert opinion still viewed the universe much the way Aristotle did, with an earth centered solar system, with special types of motion for the objects in the heavens, with celestial spheres that held up the planets as they orbited

the Earth out in space. So at the age of twenty seven, Galileo was appointed a professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, and he would go on to challenge many of the strains of thinking about physics and astronomy that have been dominant in European history. Often these beliefs passed on by Aristotle. So one example of the way he challenged these things was his important discoveries in

the physics of motion and inertia. I think just in the past year, Robert we did an episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind where we talked about Galileo's thought experiment about the falling bodies, you know, where he was identifying the idea that the rate of acceleration for falling objects is actually the same between lighter objects and heavier objects,

except for the influence of air resistance. But another question that's interesting about inertia that was addressed by Galileo is the idea of um, how do you tell how would you tell if the Earth was rotating? If you're on the surface of the Earth and it's spinning. Let's say you're sort of a shoot from the hip seventeenth century

conventional physicist. You want to argue it's obvious the Earth doesn't rotate because if you throw a ball straight up in the air and the Earth were rotating, the ball should land west of where you tossed it from right, because the Earth should continue to rotate under it while the ball is up at the air right and it's kind of like a like a carnival ride. Um understanding of how the earth rotation would work. But Galileo has

got a good answer for this. It doesn't fall away from you if the ball and the Earth and the atmosphere are all moving together at the same rate in the same direction. This is a crucial bit of reasoning about inertial reference frames. In the world of motion. Difference means acceleration. If there are a group of objects all moving in the same direction at the same speed, they might as well be standing still with reference to each other. It's only when the speed or the direction changes in

the motion that we notice the difference. So you throw a ball straight up in the air on a rotating earth, it's actually like throwing a ball straight up in the air inside an airplane. Right. If you were able to like take a cross section of the airplane and look at the path of the ball, and you were standing still just looking at it passed by, the ball would go in an arc right, because it would go up from the person's hand. But also everything in the plane,

including the ball, is going horizontally. You don't throw the ball up in the airplane, first of all, don't throw balls in the airplane. But if you throw a ball up in the airplane, it's not going to just go flying, uh, you know, straight back through the through the plane and then smack into the door of the toilet exactly because the airplane, the air inside the airplane, and the ball and the person throwing it are all within the same

reference frame of horizontal motion. They're all traveling at the same speed in the same direction. So relative to the person in the plane, the ball just goes up and down. And the same thing happens on Earth's surface. I mean, if you were looking out from space, a ball thrown straight up from the Earth's surface actually does go in an arc, but relative to the person standing there who threw it up, who's moving at the same speed, and the around the around the center of rotation of the Earth,

it just goes straight up and down. So so, and that's the realm of like physics and inertia, in which Galileo was very influential and very important. But Galileo also found out about the invention of the telescope in the Netherlands, and he almost immediately had the insight to turn the magnification power of the telescope to the night sky. And he also, using his engineering skills, he made improvements to the design of the primordial telescope to increase its power.

He eventually, I think it within just a couple of month, he had scaled it up to twenty times magnification. Uh So, I guess we should discuss a couple of the examples of what Galileo saw when he looks through the telescope and how it provided evidence that changed the dominant strains of thinking about the universe. Now. One of his first observations was the moon. Yeah, I mean, what that's that's gonna be the first thing you're gonna look at. No

better than to look at the sun. But there's the moon. Let's take a closer look. I mean, what's there to learn about the moon? We can all see the moon right like, the moon's right there. It just seems like, what what should you be able to learn about the moon? That would be revolutionary by looking at it in a magnified way. But I thought this was really interesting. So in December of sixteen o nine he observed the moon

through the telescope. And of course humans have been gazing at the Moon at night for a long time, but a common belief in the geocentric cosmology of the time was that the moon and other objects above the lunar sphere. This was a you know, a designation of a certain area around the Earth in the heavens, that the stuff in the lunar sphere and above it was perfect, which

would mean perfectly smooth, sort of featureless heavenly spheres. So well, we could see patterns of changes in the coloration of the Moon from the Earth. With the naked eye, many imagine the Moon to be sort of like a heavenly ball bearing. But what did Galileo see when he looked at the moon? Well, specifically, he made observations of the terminator line. This is the division between day and night

on a partially illuminated moon. So you're seeing, you know, part of the moon is lit up by the sun and part of it as the nighttime part of the moon, and we're seeing that horizon of sunrise or sunset from the Earth. If you've ever looked at this, what is the line like, Well, of course it's jagged, and that's it's jagged because the surface of the Moon is textured with mountains and valleys and craters of different elevations which catch the light of the sunrise or the sunset differently

and cast longer or shorter shadows. The surface of the Moon was a terrain like the surface of the Earth, making it seem like maybe the Moon and the Earth are not actually special examples of fundamentally different universal essences or spheres of being, but instead are similar chunks of

matter obeying the same physical laws. So in other words, it was almost almost like we've discussed on at least on stuff to blow your mind, like you know, older models of the Moon as being like some sort of a mirror like object or certainly here like a holy ball bearing. And basically he's looking at the Moon and seeing that the Moon is at least earth like on

the surface. Like it is. It is earthlike in a not in the sense that it has trees or lie or canals or anything, but is it the very least like it's it seems to be made of a sort of dirt or rock. It is land. Yeah, it has terrain, it has mountains, it as craters, there's stuff going on there. Uh So that meant, yeah, that's an interesting point of analogy. Then I think the really big observation came with Jupiter.

So this would have been I guess just like a month later in January of six ten, Galileo was making observations of Jupiter. And to be perfectly clear, Galileo did not discover Jupiter. We mentioned earlier that you know, the planets up to Uranus had been known about for a long time. They could be seen with the naked eye. Jupiter's bright enough to see with the naked eye under the right conditions as a point of light. So people

would have known about Jupiter since ancient times. What made Galileo's observations of Jupiter special was that when viewed through his upgraded telescope, Jupiter's sort of single point of light became four points of light, bringing us back to the moons. Yeah, exactly, so he saw he saw these points of light in a straight line alongside Jupiter, like as if mounted on a rod going through the equator of the greater planet.

So first he made a note and decided, Okay, I guess maybe these are stars, but I'll come back and check later. And if they were background stars, by the time he came back to check again later, they should have moved along with the rest of the background starfield, you know, because Jupiter would be closer and it's moving along, uh, you know, independent of the stars. But instead he found that these other stars stuck to Jupiter like glue, and that also they moved, They moved back and forth as

if along this rod, stringing them to the planet. And later he discovered that there was a fourth star in in this line along with Jupiter, in addition to the three had already seen this naturally suggested a radical conclusion, which is that Jupiter has satellites, and we now know these, Yes, the Galilean moons of Jupiter. We did a whole episode of stuff to blow your mind about them. It's io Ganymede,

Europa and Callisto, and these are moons. But what was undeniable at the time was that this other planet had satellites orbiting it the same way that Earth did, the same way the Earth has a moon, Jupiter has moons. So if there were moons orbiting Jupiter, then it's really hard to keep swinging your sword for the cosmological uniqueness of Earth in the geocentric model. Like, it's clear evidence that there is at least one other center of motion

in the universe, and it's Jupiter. And if Jupiter can be a center of motion, why can't the Sun be a center of motion? Right? It ultimately ends up simplifying your attempts to get a grasp on, you know, the celestial mechanics of your immediate neighborhood. Yeah. Now, like with the invention of the telescope, the credit for the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, I think is also somewhat

historically disputed. I've read there's there's some attempts to credit the German astronomer Simon Marius, who I think has also been credited as maybe a sort of inventor of the telescope. Um. It's it's also and suggested that the ancient Chinese astronomer Gone Day might have seen one of the moons of Jupiter, or seeing the moons of Jupiter when he described in the fourth century b c. E. Having seen a small

object next to Jupiter. Uh. And and technically, I think if the conditions are just right, it's kind of like with seeing Uranus. Right, like, if it's just right, you might be able to make out the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. But it's it's tough, it's it's hard to do. But with the telescope it becomes predictable. You know that you can point the telescope at Jupiter and see these bodies. It's not like, you know, it's

glimpsing something that may or may not be there. Of course that you know, that's still that becomes an issue with the telescope and astronomy in general. Uh. You know, in the period to follow we've discussed that on our

shows before as well. Yeah, yeah, and so Galileo's progress in astronomy and physics, I think it helped pave the way for the revolutionary work of other scientists like Isaac Newton, you know, who picked up the tour which of this idea of the uniformity of physical laws, showing that one thing Newton showed was the same physical laws that governed the path of a cannonball on Earth also governed the motions of the planets and the comets, right universal gravitation.

That that's the big Newtonian breakthrough. There's no special physics or special essences for the heavens. It's just matter and energy obeying the same underlying laws of physics. And I think the telescope was what allowed the empirical observations that gave way to that way of seeing the world. It made it possible. The telescope showed us that up there was like down here, and it could be understood now.

The telescope in the microscope are are like we said, are their twin technologies in many ways, and they have I think together lead to changes that have drastically changed our understanding of our place in the cosmos. Um I always come back to the wonderful documentary short The Powers of Ten by Charles and ray Eames from seven. It's great, Yeah, it's it's readily available on YouTube. So if you have

not seen it, go watch it now. Uh, and you know, stop listening to this podcast, go watch Powers of Ten and come back, because says even today, you know, it effectively conveys the scale of the physical universe via orders of magnitude. And these technologies, the telescope and the microscope, they've enabled us to begin a journey both inward and outward.

And while you know, we might have thought, you know, previously you could essentially like hold up at a telescope and you'd be able to, you know, glimpse the barricades of heaven, the limits of of the universe. But it's but what's been more amazing is that we've either the absence of those barriers are our inability to glimpse such limits on a cosmos that's utterly on a scale beyond

anything we've evolved to comprehend. Modern astronomy is is entirely dependent though upon this technological logical step, the invention of the telescope. Now we've gone a long way, since the simple glass refraction telescope, which you know, bent light through a transparent medium. Even optical telescopes now that are just using visible light tend to be more on the basis of mirrors because it's easier to magnify more that way.

It's a reflection instead of refraction. But there are also tons of other types of telescopes that aren't even looking at visible light anymore, right, I mean, you've got radio telescopes, X ray telescopes, gamma ray telescopes, cosmic ray telescopes. You know, there's a tremendous amount of human achievement in space exploration that you can lump under the legacy column for the telescope. Again, it's just really hard to overstate the importance of this invention.

But then there are also a number of telescope based technologies and gadgets to consider that there may be a little more, you know, rooted in terrestrial existence. Considered the sextant, for example, which depends on a telescope and enabled navigators to measure the angle between an astronomical object and the horizon, a key for celestial navigation and see. Another is the theodolite. Uh, this is an optical instrument that is used to measure

angles between points. And you've all seen this before, uh probably driving around watching surveyors at work. Is used in surveying, is used in construction, also used in meteorology and rocketry. But it would not be possible without basic telescope technology and uh on. On a much lesser note, or maybe not a lesser note, the telescope is also a predecessor to the kaleidoscope, which you know, it's a fun get that I actually would wouldn't mind doing a whole episode on.

But it was invented in the early nineteenth century by the Scottish scientist David Brewster, a noted optics expert himself, who also invented and improved uh stereoscope, you know, stereo viewers and uh and also a binocular camera and other optical inventions. Uh yeah. Once you start going down the rabbit hole of looking at like improvements and an optical technology and new optical technology innovations and inventions, uh, you know, it really gets gets fascinated. Yeah yeah, and it's I mean,

the telescope. I think it would not be wrong to say that it changed the world. I don't want to put everything on the telescope and not say and say

that there were not other influences. But I think the telescope was one of the most important things that led to this change in our way of thinking about the universe, that said, uh, you know that that phenomena everywhere can be understood by appealing to universal laws and not necessarily like special circumstances that that can't be understood from our

point of view. Right, Yeah, And and again it's it's such a fascinating one too, because it's it's it's a situation where like, you know, all the elements were there all you know, the technology was available, and then it's you know, looking back in retrospect, you know, we we can we can look at the timeline and say, like, you know, who's gonna do it? Why? Why have they not invented it yet? Why is the telescope not changing the world yet? And then the moment occurs, and uh,

and the world changes. We already mentioned this, but I am very interested in in actually going backward in this story to some time in the future, come back to earlier moments of breakthroughs in optics and refraction lenses, the creation of spectacles, for example, spectacles is a key one. Now we have done a previous episode on sunglasses. Yeah, so, which gets a little bit into the the into the spectacles area, but not completely. Oh, I should have mentioned this.

I can't believe I forgot when we're talking about Giovanni Della Giovanni Batista della Porta. Uh, he apparently proposed some changes I think to the camera obscura. I don't know if he was the first person to do this, but I think he proposed a camera obscura with a lens on it as opposed to just depenhole. Basically, what we're saying is it eventually on Invention we will cover the complete history of optical technology because there's a lot. There's a lot kind of Again, it comes back to what

we are and such. We're such highly visual creatures that optical technology is of course groundbreaking. It is of course world changing, be it the way the motion picture changed the world or the way that the telescope change the world. Yeah. I'm also feeling a little bit of regret that we maybe, maybe in this episode we went too far with the egg based cryptography and and barred ourselves the opportunity to do a whole episode on egg based cryptography in the future.

I don't know, there could be more. I don't know. This is my my introduction to egg based cryptography. So well, perhaps there's there's a whole episode's worth of additional data out there we should consider. We're just egg technology in general, right, Who invented that wire slicer thing for your hard boiled eggs? Oh? You know this is actually you bringing this up. Unitaskers is the term that sometimes use for kitchen devices like this Brown. I don't know if, but he uses it

all the time. He loathes unitaskers. Uh, you know, it depends on the un task or some of them. I love. But I would actually love to do an episode where we just look at different unitasker devices, you know, because those are kind of like the ultimate and invention right where you have you've, you've you've come up with with

with this device that doesn't really change the world. What changes the world in very small and specific ways, such as cutting down the time it takes to slice a boiled egg into several pieces, not just cutting down the time, also ensuring regularity in the word of slices. Yeah, I'm also generally against unitaskers, but there are a few I can probably think of that I get into every time I use a spatula, I I wonder, like, what is the like the full history of the spatulate? How did

we get to this point? And then I forget to look into it afterwards. No, yeah, the differences the history of cooking culture is really interesting, like like using chopsticks to cook versus using them to eat. You know, yeah, yeah, that was previous episode of Invention. All right, So as as you can tell, we're open to all manner of subjects here on Invention, and we would love to hear from you if you have any particular request. If there's a UNI tasker out there, uh, you know that we should,

you know, give due diligence on the show. Let us know we would love to hear from you. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. That's where we'll find them all. And remember, the most important thing you can do to support this show and ensure we keep delivering it to you is to make sure you have subscribed to it somewhere and then make sure that you have left or review uh and a rating if

that is at all possible. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, just to say hi, you can email us at contact dot invention pod dot com. Invention is production of I Heart Radio from our podcasts, from my heart Radio, because the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H