top of page
  • Nadventr2

Galileo made a living selling gadgets including the telescope, until it got him in deep trouble.

Updated: Dec 6, 2020

In 1609, Galileo improved on Hans Lippershey's dutch telescope design and began to sell them to merchants in Venice, but why would merchants want to buy a telescope? It's because they could spot ships at sea 2 hours earlier than someone without a telescope, so they had a jump on the market before anyone else, and that helped them make more money. It would be like knowing the stock market today 2 hours before anyone else.


The telescope wasn't the first scientific instrument Galileo sold to make a living. In 1598, he invented the geometric compass that made easy work out of calculating interest, extracting squares and cube roots, drawing polygons, and

calculating areas and volumes. It would also measure gauges that helped survey territory. It was a precursor to the slide rule, which was used until the 1970s!. In 1606, he wrote an accompanying book that explained everything the compass could do and he made a hefty profit from both.


He did get into a bit of a fight over who invented the compass but won in court. That wouldn't be the last of his trouble though. As almost everyone knows, it is the telescope that got him in real trouble. After successfully marketing and selling his telescopes, he started using them himself to look at the sky. After seeing the crescent phases of Venus and discovering the 4 big moons of Jupiter, he was sure that the Earth revolved around the sun, just like Copernicus had been saying with his mathematical models. Copernicus, however, was in trouble with the church and it didn't take long for Galileo to get in deep as well. The church "informed" him that he was posting theories and nothing more. The math that Copernicus came up with helped with the church's calendars for sure, but "it did not" represent what was going on in the sky, and to imply that it did was blasphemy. They warned Galileo several times, but he just couldn't let go of all that he was seeing. Sunspots on the "perfect sun", mountains and craters on the moon, a comet that followed a curved path that passed right through Aristotle's crystal spheres, the moons going around Jupiter (not the Earth), and more. Lucky for Galileo that he was friends with many monarchs that he had personally trained on how to use his compass. His fame and friends in high places meant that the most that was done to him was house arrest in a house that the church provided.


-----


PS. Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest, but never stopped inventing and observing. He came up with a micrometer device to measure the distance of Jupiter's moons from Jupiter. From this, he came up with a method for knowing your longitude by observing the precise positions of the moons. You could tell what time it was anywhere on the Earth just by referring the position of the moons to those in almanacs that were eventually published. It wouldn't work on a ship* obviously but would work on the land. This method is said to have been used to check the chronometers that Lewis and Clark were carrying in 1803-1806.

Interestingly enough, when trying to make an almanac for the moon's movement around Jupiter, it was noticed that there was a lag that came and went depending on where Jupiter was in its orbit. In 1676, Ole Romer figured out that it was the speed of light that was causing the problem, and he successfully measured it using the timing difference of the moon's eclipses that depended on where the Earth was in its orbit. He came up with 220,000 km/s..not bad.


*In 1714, an act of British parliament created the board of longitude and they offered a cash prize to the first person who could come up with a way to accurately measure the time on a ship, so as to derive the current longitude from the stars.

The prizes were quite generous because they really needed to know where their ships were, as recently 2000 men had perished in shipwrecks due to poor navigation.


- £10,000 for a method that could determine longitude within 60 nautical miles (110 km; 69 mi) (£1,300,000 as of 2016)

-£15,000 for a method that could determine longitude within 40 nautical miles (74 km; 46 mi) (£1,900,000 as of 2016)

-£20,000 for a method that could determine longitude within 30 nautical miles (56 km; 35 mi) (£2,600,000 as of 2016


John Harrison invented the chronometer, and with this, the British navy knew where they were at all times and became the most powerful navy in the world, until those pesky Americans came along.


Whew, this post got a little out of hand...so I think I should stop for now :)

13 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All
bottom of page