cover image Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror

Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror

Eileen Reeves, . . Harvard Univ., $21.95 (231pp) ISBN 978-0-674-02667-4

Galileo is mistakenly believed by many to have invented the telescope—a misconception that the scientist did little to correct in his own time. Rather, as Reeves, an associate professor of comp lit at Princeton, reminds readers in reviewing both the myths and facts of telescopy, Galileo perfected a relatively crude Dutch invention that he had gotten wind of. It was his improved version, which he christened a “telescope,” that he used to discover the four large moons around Jupiter and the topography of the Earth’s moon. However, as Reeves recounts, reports of magical mirrors and lenses dated back to the lighthouse of ancient Alexandria, which according to legend, was topped by an enormous mirror that could spy enemy ships and set them on fire. Stories circulated about other cultures, often Eastern, whose rulers used mirrors to keep a watchful eye on their citizens and spot invaders from afar. The English friar and scientist Francis Bacon intrigued generations with stories of marvelous looking glasses and a mirror that Julius Caesar supposedly used to observe the coast of England from France. In Galileo’s time, the author 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. 5 illus. (Jan.)