By taking our sense of sight far beyond the realm of our forebears' imagination, these wonderful instruments, the telescopes, open the way to a deeper and more perfect understanding of nature.
—René Descartes, 1637
The first telescope was used in the Netherlands in 1608. They attempted to patent the device with the description of it being that it "aided in seeing faraway things as though nearby". The government denied their patent, stating it was too easy to copy. The first telescope had a convex and a concave lens in a tube.
A drawing of what the first telescope looked like can be seen below.
Galileo Galilei did some upgrades to the telescope in 1609 and on. His telescopes were of a more powerful magnification and very popular. Observing space through his telescopes gave the rise to the thinking that the planets circled around the sun. His telescopes used a concave eyepiece lens and a convex objective lens.
All telescope makers faced the difficulty of finding glass for the lenses that was pure and without iron impurities which caused a green tinge when looking through the scope.
Seeing therefore the Improvement of Telescopes of given length by Refractions is desperate, I contrived heretofore a Perspective by Reflexions, using instead of an Object-glass a concave metal.
—Newton, Opticks, 1704
Newton designed an even better telescope and presented it to England's Royal Society in 1672. This telescope had the capability of a magnification of about 40.
