Much like other displays of power, the same lenses we flaunt to remind ourselves how chic we are, unavoidably expose our hidden shortcomings and insecurities about the world around us (Cohen,2014). The telescope which was one of the central instruments of what had been called the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century revealed the unsuspected phenomena in the heavens. It was not until the completion of the thirteenth that lenses existed as they are today, even though their properties of convex plus concave clear items had long been known. Glass of reasonable quality had become relatively cheap and in the major glass-making centers of Venice and Florence techniques for grinding and polishing glass had reached a high state of development.
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"For anyone not familiar with practical optics the results are astonishing," he says. Willach's own experiments looking through an old-school lens with a diaphragm at an optician's chart bear that out. "The whole text becomes sharp and clear, nearly as good as seen with a modern optical instrument"”(Henbest,2015). Once this was perfected the modern day telescope was made and here we are today. It has been over two-thousand years since man first recognized that glass bends light. Claudius Ptolemy a Greco- Egyptian writer, mathematician,astronomer, geographer, and astrologer had recounted a stick that had almost seemed to bow in water in the second century BC. He had meticulously documented the “angles to within half a degree” and then very precisely determined “the refraction constant of water” (History, …show more content…
They used different shapes and thicknesses of glass to experiment with. It was during these experiments that they realized that if you held the glass “lenses” over an object it would make the object appear larger. They referred to these early glass pieces as magnifiers or like mentioned earlier burning glasses. During this same time period the Roman Stoic philosopher,Seneca, described actual magnification by a globe of water. "Letters, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe of glass filled with water." This particular manner of observing things was not utilized much until the end of the 13th century when spectacle makers were producing lenses to be worn as glasses. Around 1600 AD it was discovered that optical instruments could be made by combining lenses (History,
"For anyone not familiar with practical optics the results are astonishing," he says. Willach's own experiments looking through an old-school lens with a diaphragm at an optician's chart bear that out. "The whole text becomes sharp and clear, nearly as good as seen with a modern optical instrument"”(Henbest,2015). Once this was perfected the modern day telescope was made and here we are today. It has been over two-thousand years since man first recognized that glass bends light. Claudius Ptolemy a Greco- Egyptian writer, mathematician,astronomer, geographer, and astrologer had recounted a stick that had almost seemed to bow in water in the second century BC. He had meticulously documented the “angles to within half a degree” and then very precisely determined “the refraction constant of water” (History, …show more content…
They used different shapes and thicknesses of glass to experiment with. It was during these experiments that they realized that if you held the glass “lenses” over an object it would make the object appear larger. They referred to these early glass pieces as magnifiers or like mentioned earlier burning glasses. During this same time period the Roman Stoic philosopher,Seneca, described actual magnification by a globe of water. "Letters, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe of glass filled with water." This particular manner of observing things was not utilized much until the end of the 13th century when spectacle makers were producing lenses to be worn as glasses. Around 1600 AD it was discovered that optical instruments could be made by combining lenses (History,