My favorite invention from this week's Innovative History is the telescope. Why, you ask? Well, it let us see the universe from an entirely different view. Without a telescope, you would be lucky to see this:
With a telescope, however, you would see this:
See what I mean? The telescope has massively impacted the earth as we know it today. We might not even bother with rockets in the first place without the telescope! We might even still think the earth was flat. Also, we would have incredibly small amounts of space knowledge. In 1608, Spectacle makers Hans Lippershey & Zacharias Janssen and Jacob Metius independently created telescopes. The telescope is made with the knowledge of the lenses, captured in a tube. It was used to discover thousands of planets, even different systems in the universe. IN 1990, scientists wanted a bigger and better view of the universe. So they launched the Hubble Space Telescope, basically a very high tech version of the telescope.
Hubble operates 24 hours a day, every day of the year, collecting an average of 18 gigabytes of science data each week. That's more than 3 DVDs of data per day.
So, what was the world before the invention? Well, Europe was divided into the protestant and the Catholic lands by 1600. The Ptolemaic model was still dominant, meaning that people were looking at the universe entirely wrong. But after the telescope was invented, there was standing proof that it was wrong. So the telescope actually changed the entire world.Copernican heliocentrismCopernican heliocentrismCopernican heliocentrism
The very fact that the telescope exists gives us "Astronomical" information about space. Get it? Astronomical? Bwahahaha!!
😁