A Brief History of the Binocular

It will not surprise the reader to learn that the origin of the telescope is closely allied to the development of the binocular. The first primitive telescopes appeared on the world’s stage back in the early seventeenth century, though, as outlined in this author’s historical work, Chronicling the Golden Age of Astronomy, the first telescopic devices probably emerged in the late sixteenth century. It was the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei who is widely celebrated as the first telescopic astronomer, who fashioned the first refracting telescopes from primitive lenses. Placing a convex (bulging out in the center) lens at the top of a cylindrical tube with a small concave (pinched inwards at the center), Galileo was able to create a magnified upright image of his surroundings. At first his instruments only magnified two or three times, but he was eventually able to fashion, largely through trial and improvement, much higher magnifying devices up to 30×, with which he was to carry out his now immortalized studies of the Moon, the nearby planets and the distant stars.