The Digges telescope...

The story of how an Englishman apparently invented the telescope in the mid-sixteenth century is not as well-known as perhaps it ought to be. Its outline was first proposed in 1991 by Colin Ronan, the then president of the British Astronomical Association (and so a credible source): a very readable set of articles (though sadly without matching illustrations) is here, from which I quote below.

Essentially, it boils down to this: that an English Renaissance surveyor and author called Leonard Digges (ca. 1520 - ca. 1559) constructed what was called at the time "perspective glasses" (the term 'telescope' did not appear until the 17th century), quite probably for surveying purposes. However, it seems likely that his son Thomas Digges pointed them to the heavens, several decades prior to Galileo.

From a Voynichological perspective, one of the nice features of the story is that one of our old friends features centrally: when Leonard Digges died, his 13-year old son Thomas was placed under the guardianship of none other than John Dee. Dee, in his preface to Billingsley's 1570 translation of Euclid had this to say:

• 'He may wonderfully helpe him selfe, by Perspective glasses. In which (I trust) our posterity will prove more skillfull and expert, and to greater purposes, than in these days, can (almost) be credited to be possible.'

This, when taken with Thomas Digges' own books and a 1583 report by William Bourne ("an expert in navigation and gunnery"), does all seem to comprise a 'smoking gun' proof that the two Digges in many significant ways predated Galileo by several decades. Which is not, of course, to diminish Galileo's historical importance per se: but rather, to show that the history of inventions is rarely as simple and linear as one might think.

One last thing: in the Netherlands patent uproar over the first 'official' telescopes, "the son of Sacharias Jansen [a better Wikipedia page is here], another of the claimants, later stated that his father [Hans Jannsen, the probable inventor of the microscope in 1590] already had a telescope of Italian manufacture, dated 1590". So the full story behind the invention of the telescope most likely remains obscure and tangled...

New telescope history book...

To mark the four hundredth anniversary next year of Galileo's first astronomical use of the telescope in 1609, the IAU has designated 2009 "The International Year of Astronomy" (IYA2009): which is likely to be the trigger for a glut of telescope history-themed books (probably no bad thing, in my opinion). But what happened before 1609?

I recently mentioned here "the lost 150 years", that awkward pause between the widespread availability of both convex and concave lenses (circa 1450) and the appearance of microscopes (circa 1590) and telescopes (circa 1600). Such compound optical devices could have been invented by anyone during that period, and the best-documented pre-1600 telescopic claim so far seems to be from Thomas Digges (John Gribbin discusses this in one of his books). But could yet other inventors (such as possibly the author of the Voynich Manuscript) have pre-dated Digges, Janssen and co?

There were plenty of alchemical-style claims to that effect, most notably from H. C. Agrippa, who wrote in his "Occult Philosophy" that "And I knew how to make by them wonderful things, in which any one might see whatsoever he pleased at a long distance" (Book II, Chapter 23) . However, there was (in this case) apparently nothing of real substance behind his bluster.

All the same, I asked on the HASTRO-L mailing list if there were any up-to-the-minute books on this far-too-quiet period, and was delighted to learn (via Peter Abrahams) of a book that is just coming out from Harvard University Press: "Galileo's Glassworks, The Telescope and the Mirror" (2008), by Eileen Reeves, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, who specialises in the study of early modern scientific literature. Though the publisher's blurb seems to make her book sound over-focused on the minutiae of Galileo's rhetoric, I'm assured that its first half does actually take in the wider pre-1609 field of view (which is precisely what I was most interested in).

The release date for Glassworks is either January 2008 or 28th February 2008 (depending on who you ask): there are already some copies for sale in the US, but it's only pre-ordering in the UK at the moment. I'll review it here when my copy arrives (counting the days)...

Some Voynich outsiders...

As a handy (but inevitably bad) generalization, there are two kinds of Voynich researchers out there: (a) social ones (who do it in a crowd) and (b) anti-social ones (who do it alone). Broadly speaking, I'm now a (b) having first done a six-year stretch as an (a): but some people (like my old friend GC, who's like my Voynichological twin brother, though without the goatee... hmmm...) manage to stay (b) with occasional flashes of (a), despite all the provocation they (inevitably?) receive online.

But when you add things like blogs to the mix, this cosy categorization starts to fall apart. Because I blog about what I'm thinking about, does that make me a kind of passive-aggressive (a), or perhaps a falsely socialized (b)? Are blogs actually social, or merely a kind of unconscious, self-aggrandizing auto-journalism? Answers on an e-postcard (to someone else), please.

Regardless, plenty of people put out their Voynich-related outsider viewpoints in varied ways: here are some you may have missed (but which my seine net picked up). Be grateful I only kept the good stuff! :-)

(1) Richard Santa Coloma has posted up a set of long-ish posts by GC here: intriguingly, GC (who for years has winced at the thought of anything apart from a 16th century origin, largely because of Leonell Strong's decryption / Askham attribution) is now mellowing towards the 15th century (though quite how the two centuries blend together is still a little wobbly).

Incidentally, the possibility (as proposed by Richard Santa Coloma) of Cornelius Drebbel-era (i.e. circa 1600) authorship for the Voynich remains interesting, though hard to square with the manuscript's 15th century art history. But perhaps the truth will turn out to be far more magnificent. Telescope histories (such as this excellent one from the Galileo Project) will tell you that the glass in Venice produced around 1450 was being ground by Florentines (and others) into both convex and concave lenses for spectacles / bericles, and so anyone with access to both could have made telescopes and microscopes. Yet the first properly documented examples of each instrument appear 140+ years later. What is curious is that, according to the Galileo Project:

• "In the literature of white magic, so popular in the sixteenth century, there are several tantalizing references to devices that would allow one to see one's enemies or count coins from a great distance. But these allusions were cast in obscure language and were accompanied by fantastic claims; the telescope, when it came, was a very humble and simple device." (http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/instruments/telescope.html para 4)

Could it be that various individuals invented and reinvented the microscope and telescope multiple times in that century-and-a-half gap? If you view the Voynich Manuscript's quires 19 and 17 (in that order), you will see what looks for all the world like a lab notebook detailing the development of a sequence of microscopes (and possibly telescopes), seguing into speculative optical instruments. If only Richard Santa Coloma "dropped the Drebbel", he might find a far more amazing story waiting to be uncovered...

(2) Sean B. Palmer has posted some interesting pages here (on "Michitonese") and here (on the zodiac month names), though in both cases chasing behind work I had done six or so months previously. A nice resource he uses which I wasn't aware of: the Xerox XRCE Language Guesser. You feed it 5 sentences of text, and it compares them with 47 languages (though doubtless a longer list in the commercial version) to determine the closest match. Kewl! (i.e. 'fascinating technology but not actually very useful').

(3) One of the quintessential twentieth century outsiders was Terence McKenna: though I can't walk in his footsteps (largely because I'm allergic to mushrooms), it is hard not to feel some kind of admiration for his endless tilting against those powerful windmills who continue to blow us around. There's an audio archive of his work here, with a long (but often terribly wrong, I'm sorry to say) discussion of the Voynich Manuscript from 1983 here...

In it, he namechecks Mary D'Imperio's "Elegant Enigma" ("this is what your tax dollars are being used for"), and notes that the VMs' internal structuring probably indicates meaningful content However, McKenna understands that it's not a Trithemius-derived code or cipher and suggests it should be compared by computer with the work of John Dee (which Leonell Strong also flagged), even though he's very much into Dee-Kelley hoax hypotheses. Modern cryptographers may well be blind to the particular "weird quirky way" in which it was encoded/enciphered, he says: alternatively, "a chemical attack should be mounted" on the manuscript's plants. Oh, and it's "aaaaahbviously sixteenth century". Around 20 minutes in, lots of Yatesian stuff gets namechecked [if you like that kind of thing]. At the time, McKenna was "advising a group of people in Santa Cruz" (almost certainly via Ralph Abraham, I guess) in their research into the VMs, "one of the great oddities of human thought".

The problem with McKenna's Voynichological heritage is his subsequent endorsement of Leo Levitov's problematic 1987 Cathar decryption (about 24mins in, read from McKenna's "Archaic Revival"), which now looks rather foolish. Oh well! By the way, the mp3 ends with about 10 minutes of frog croaking, which may or may not be meaningful (you choose). :-)

And the new Thorndike is... Thorndike!

Lynn Thorndike's vast, multi-volume "History of Magic and Experimental Science" stands as a gigantic monument to the huge amount of, well, stuff that is in the archives but which mainstream historians circa 1920 thought to be unworthy of discussion. Thankfully, things have now changed somewhat!

Kessinger Publishing has reprinted much of Thorndike's work: but (unless I've misinterpreted things) their modern print-on-demand reprints seem to be about £25 for 200-ish page segments, whereas copies of the original eight volumes (published in pairs in 1923, 1934, 1941, and 1958, and each volume of which is 600-700 pages) go second hand for £30 or so.

Even something like Thorndike's "History of Medieval Europe" can be picked up for £5 or less, while the Kessinger POD reprint is more than £20. Bizarre economics!

As with David Kahn, everyone namechecks Thorndike: but few have read all 6,000-odd pages of the HoMaES series. I'll admit it: though to date I've only ever read sections as required, one day I'll read the whole lot... I hope!

All in all, there really doesn't (unless you know better?) seem to be a Thorndike 2.0, a decent modern alternative to HoMaES in (say) only 1,500 pages or less. So even 50 years on from Vols VII and VIII, the new Thorndike is still Thorndike!

Besicles...?!

Just mooching around the web looking for Trithemius-related stuff (as you do), I saw a reference to Renaissance "telescopes, microscopes and bezicles" in the first (free) page of Polygraphia and the Renaissance sign: The case of Trithemius, from the Springer journal Neophilologus. I had never heard of "bezicles", so decided to have a sniff around, see what I was missing.

It turns out that the author meant the (more modern French) "besicles", meaning 'spectacles' (though people usually say lunettes): there's a glossary of spectacles terms here. Now: besicles was originally bericles, where the 'r' somehow transformed into 's' over the centuries (but you'd have to ask a linguist about this subtle shift). And bericles was in turn from beryl, a "smoke-coloured stone" (according to this fun page on spectacles history) used to grind the lenses from - although pure beryl is colourless, & it is the impurities in it which give it colour.

There's a bigger article on spectacles in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (yes, really!), though you'd need to pay to read it (boo, hiss).