Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror

Eileen Reeves

Published by Harvard University Press 2008

Galileo’s Glassworks

The Telescope and the Mirror

Eileen Reeves

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674042636

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book considers the lapse between the Dutch telescope’s 1608 creation in The Hague and Galileo’s acquaintance with such news ten months later. Along the way, Reeves offers a revised chronology of Galileo’s life in this critical period.

Reviews

Reeves’s splendid account is a cultural and social history that sets Galileo’s telescope in the rich landscape of optical science from the Middle Ages to the modern period.
-- Simon Mitton Times Higher Education Supplement

Fascinating… Eileen Reeves shows just how tangled with myth and legend the history of the telescope, and Galileo’s pioneering use of it, actually was… Ms. Reeves recounts this complicated history with great flair. She is more interested in the missteps and the stumbles that accompanied momentous discoveries than in their scientific significance, and rightly so. The tale of Galileo’s telescope is, as it turns out, an intensely human one. Sometimes, amid the intrigue and the campaigns of slander and distortion which surrounded Galileo’s discoveries, it seems as if the chief obstacle to a clear-sighted gaze at the heavens lay not in better optics but in piercing dense clouds of misconception. As Ms. Reeves shows, Galileo was no isolated genius; he built on the scattered findings of his predecessors. To certain contemporaries, he appeared as a modern Prometheus, but he was also a shrewd operator, as ambitious as he was inquisitive. There was something both sublime and stubborn in his nosiness, yet in the end it led him to the stars.
-- Eric Ormsby New York Sun

Scattered with intriguing nuggets.
-- Kirkus Reviews

In Galileo’s time, [Reeves] reports, many scientists and amateurs were experimenting with optics and purloining each other’s results in a complex game of cross-national thievery. Reeves’s study is a skillful interpretative blend of legend, history and science about lenses, mirrors and their conjoining in the telescope.
-- Publishers Weekly

Eileen Reeves’s book provides us with a significant effort for a better understanding of the cultural features involved in the making of the telescope. Highly original and innovative, Galileo’s Glassworks paves the way for further inquiries that will deepen our knowledge of the relationship between well-established cultural models and technological innovations.
-- Michele Camerota, Professor of the History of Science, University of Cagliari

The telescope was ‘invented’ in 1608. But what about the events leading up to it? Galileo and his contemporaries were searching for a device with which ‘from an incredible distance we might read the smallest letters.’ Eileen Reeves tells a story of ‘cultural optics’: magical mirrors and political intrigue, and investigators looking for magnifying power in all the wrong places, while the solution lay in the humble spectacle lenses on their noses. An excellent read, and an important contribution to the history of science.
-- Albert van Helden, Lynette S. Autrey Professor of History, Rice University

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction: The Hague, 1608 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Daily Mirror of Empire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. Idle Inventions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
3. Obscure Procedures and Odd Opponents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
4. The Dutch Telescope and the French Mirror Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
5. The Afterlife of a Legend Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 239

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674042636