Telescopium: sive Ars perficiendi novum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera in tres partes divisa.
Frankfurt: Paul Jacobi for Luca Jennis, 1618. / Hardcover. First edition, extremely rare, of “the first book about the telescope, its invention and use” (Zinner). Written by the Milanese scholar Girolamo Sirtori in 1612, only four years after the telescope was invented, it contained a complete set of instructions and diagrams for building a refracting telescope, and gave in the second part the first detailed account of Galileo’s telescope. Dedicated to the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, Telescopium is also one of the most important sources for the history of the invention and first uses of the telescope. Sirtori records the arrival of a telescope in Milan in May 1609, brought by ‘a Frenchman’ who was an associate of its inventor, Hans Lipperhey, and presented to the Count of Fuentes; this was about a month before Galileo first learned of the invention (according to Sidereus Nuncius). Sirtori claims to have seen and handled Lipperhey’s very first telescope, but also suggests that the device was known to others before the Dutchman. He also provides an account of a famous meeting organised by Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, dated by Rosen to 14 April 1611, at which a select group of natural philosophers and mathematicians, including Sirtori himself, met Galileo and experienced the performance of his telescope in person – this was “the public unveiling of the term telescope” (Rosen, p. 31). Galileo received a copy of Sirtori’s work in 1633 from the hands of Cassiano dal Pozzo, his fellow Lincean and great collector and begetter of the ‘Museo Cartaceo’ (Cassiano Dal Pozzo to Galileo [in Rome], Rome, 18 June 1633, Opere XV, p. 158); this is presumably the copy which belonged to François Arago, cited by both Brunet and Riccardi, and having notes in Galileo’s hand. ABPC/RBH list only three other complete copies, two of them in Macclesfield sammelbands, the other an ex-library copy with removed stamps. The Honeyman copy, a presentation copy from the author to Tommaso Mingoni (Menghin), Leibartzt of Rudolph II, and a friend of Kepler, lacked one of the plates. OCLC lists Chicago and Yale only in North America; VD17 gives only 5 locations. Provenance: Gabriel-Nicolas de la Reynie, French magistrate and bibliophile (1625-1709) (signature on front paste-down). Nicolas de la Reynie was the first Lieutenant General of the Paris police, a new position created by Colbert, which he held from 1667 to 1697. He became a Councillor of State in 1680. Reynie was known as an important and discerning collector of ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts, which he himself collated and reconstructed, and as a bibliophile, assembling one of the finest private libraries in Paris. Albert Van Helden has emphasised that the telescope was not so much invented as recognised. Almost immediately after its first public appearance the device evolved from an optical toy into a scientific instrument of a new and explicitly philosophical kind: a tool whose manipulation could yield natural-philosophical truth. The telescope opened the way for the air pump, the barometer, and the microscope, all of which appeared in the course of the seventeenth century; the emergence of the telescope therefore matters in the history of science not only as the invention of a new device or as a transformation of the human image of the universe but as a turning-point in what counted as scientific practice. Sirtori himself, writing in 1612 only four years after the device first reached the public, was already sceptical that Hans Lipperhey, the man whose patent application of 25 September 1608 is the earliest documentary trace of the instrument, was also its inventor. The opening of Sirtori’s narrative places the events at Middelburg in Zeeland in 1608. An unnamed visitor of Hollander origin, distinguished by his remarkable bearing, called on the spectacle-maker Hans Lippersein and ordered a quantity of concave and convex lenses. On collecting the finished lenses he raised one of each kind and slowly moved them in front of his eye, testing the focal-length combination, and then departed without further explanation. The artisan, prompted by his customer’s gestures, repeated the procedure, joined the lenses in a tube, and rushed his result to the court of Prince Maurits. The prince, Sirtori intimates, had been quietly acquainted with the device already and had chosen to keep its military potential a secret; finding the cat out of the bag, he praised the spectacle-maker’s industry. Sirtori adds that the very first telescope, which he claims to have seen and handled, was the most accurate of all those that subsequently followed. His own first encounter with a telescope, he goes on to record, took place in May 1609 when a Frenchman, calling himself an associate of the Dutch inventor, brought such a tube into Milan and offered it to the Count of Fuentes. The Count entrusted the device to a silversmith for re-mounting in a silver tube, and Sirtori took advantage of the interval to handle and dismantle it. He produced a few imitations of his own, but the inadequacy of the lenses available to him was at once apparent, and he set out for Venice in pursuit of better glass. There he squandered money on workmen who could not match his patterns, and lost his only finished lens after the imprudence of climbing the campanile of San Marco for a public trial; a curious crowd of noble youths overwhelmed him and passed the telescope from hand to hand for nearly two hours before being recalled to their dinners. He left Venice the following day to avoid a recurrence. The episode left him uncertain of the exact proportions on which the device depended. Persistent rumours of telescopes in Spain that could distinguish a man at three miles drew him, in 1610, to Catalonia. At Girona he met an aged architect who had once been a spectacle-maker, and who eventually unlocked his old tools and showed Sirtori a manuscript description of the art, allowing him to trace the proportions by three points. Sirtori later identified his informant as a brother of Juan Roget of Burgundy, who had introduced lens-making into Spain and whose three sons had carried on the trade, one of them in the Dominican order having committed the procedures to writing. Van Helden has cautioned against treating Roget as the inventor of the telescope on the strength of a 1959 paper by Simon de Guilleuma; the Roget evidence is interesting because it documents the circulation of lens-making know-how from which the telescope ultimately emerged, not because it allows the device itself to be attributed to a particular hand. From Spain, Sirtori writes, he returned home, hired workmen, and discovered that lenses ground from the same mould were never quite equal to one another — the inequality being due partly to imperfections in the iron form, partly to varying thickness of the glass blank, and partly to the unsteadiness of the workman’s hand. Still frustrated, he travelled to Rome, where on the famous evening Federico Cesi, Marquis of Monticello and founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, had invited Galileo and several other learned men to dine in his vineyard, the Vigna Malvasia. Before sunset Galileo’s telescope was turned on the inscription of Pope Sixtus V above the Lateran portal, about a mile distant; after dinner the company observed Jupiter and the moving Medicean stars, and Galileo himself, in answer to their curiosity, took out the convex objective and the concave eye-glass and laid them open on the table. Sirtori took the opportunity to examine and measure the tube, and to handle the lenses; he records that the exact proportion between objective and eye-glass was the last detail he then lacked. That detail came to him in 1611 at Innsbruck, on a journey through Germany. Maximilian, Archduke of Austria, summoned him for an audience and led him to a porch on whose wall Galileo’s telescope design had been drawn out at full size; Galileo had sent it to Maximilian of Bavaria, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, who had passed it to the Archduke through his chamberlain Johannes Zuckmesser. Sirtori produced his Spanish paper patterns and superimposed them on the drawing — the curve of the first convex lens, used in Italian spectacles for presbyopia, and the seventh and last concave lens of the Roget series — and the patterns coincided exactly with the lines on the wall. Sirtori told the Archduke he could build the instrument provided he had iron forms cut to those proportions. Plague intervened, however, and he travelled down the Inn and Danube to Vienna, where he completed the forms at his own expense. The composition of Telescopium followed at Milan in 1612. Most historians have come to treat the search for an individual inventor as misplaced. What happened in 1608, on this view, was not an invention but the recognition of an existing possibility: indications of the magnifying effect produced by combining two lenses can be found in the literature long before that date, including a remark of 1538 by Girolamo Fracastoro (c. 1478–1553) that two spectacles held one above the other made everything appear larger and closer. The telescope, in Van Helden’s 1977 phrase, was not invented out of nothing; the historically meaningful question is who first recognised that the combination could be adapted into an instrument capable of substantial magnification. The available evidence does not allow a confident answer to that question. The earliest undeniable mention of the telescope is the letter of 25 September 1608 that Hans Lipperhey carried to The Hague, and the earliest patent application is also Lipperhey’s; but to award him the invention purely on that basis is, as Van Helden has cautioned, an exercise in historical positivism. A substantial portion of Telescopium is given over to the construction of a Galilean refractor, and especially to the techniques of grinding and polishing the two lenses on which its performance depends. As Giuseppe Molesini has analysed, the Galilean instrument required a plano-convex objective and a plano-concave eye-lens; the eye-lens could be produced by procedures already in use in the spectacle trade, but the objective demanded new tools. In a spectacle the part of the lens used at any moment is only the diameter of the pupil, but in a telescope objective the whole lens is in use continuously, so that the demand for spherical accuracy and surface regularity extends across the full diameter. To obtain the focal length of a metre or more typical of seventeenth-century telescopes the radius of curvature also had to be much longer than that of any spectacle lens. The glass plate therefore had to pass through three new stages — preliminary rough shaping, a grinding stage that fixed the spherical form, and a polishing stage that removed residual roughness — each requiring specific tools that only in small part could be borrowed from the spectacle craft. Sirtori records, and Molesini has reconstructed, the procedure in detail. The selected glass blank was first rounded with a divider, probably tipped with a cutting diamond. It was then attached with pitch, bitumen, or plaster to the top of a handle of the kind used by spectacle-lens makers, and abraded against an iron or copper tool plate of the opposite curvature. Grinding proper used a fine emery abrasive called spoltiglia, prepared by repeated suspension and decantation in water until only the smallest particles remained. Torricelli’s later refinement of the technique consisted in adding the abrasive only as needed and then continuing the grinding with no fresh emery, moistened from time to time with a drop of water or even with the operator’s breath; when the residual powder had become a fine white grease the surface was finished. Carefully carried out, the process produced lenses of excellent sphericity, capable of forming an image even before the polishing step. Sirtori wrote Telescopium in 1612, and it was advertised in the catalogue of the Frankfurt book fair held that spring (Rosen, p. 41). The book remained unpublished, however, until 1618, and Sirtori was scooped for the honour of being the first to use the term telescope in print by Giulio Cesare Lagalla, another attendee at Cesi’s banquet at the Vigna Malvasia, who published his De phoenomenis in orbe lunae novi telescopii usu A D. Gallileo Gallileo nunc iterum suscitatis physica disputatio at Venice that same year. Of the author himself little is known with certainty. Girolamo Sirtori (in Latin Hieronymus Sirturus) was born at Milan in the second half of the sixteenth century and educated for the law and theology, taking minor orders. By the time of the writing of Telescopium he was settled in Milan and moved in the circle of the Borromeo cardinal-archbishops; the dedication of the book to Cosimo II de’ Medici suggests a search for Florentine patronage, perhaps facilitated by his Lincean acquaintances. He died at an unknown date after 1618 and may not have lived to see his work in print. The principal modern study, by Rössler in Zeitschrift für ophthalmologische Optik 24 (1936), reconstructs his biography from documents in the Ambrosiana and from the dedicatory letters of his book; even with these, the personal contours of the man remain indistinct, and the Sirtori we know is in effect the figure he projects in the autobiographical sections of Telescopium — the persistent investigator who tracks the secret of the device from Milan to Venice to Catalonia and ultimately to Innsbruck and Vienna, putting together the proportions of the optics through patient comparison and the labour of his own hands. The book’s rarity is itself a story of how technical handbooks circulated in early seventeenth-century Europe. Most of the few hundred copies printed at Frankfurt in 1618 must have been bound up in working sammelbands of telescopic and astronomical works and used until they wore out; the Macclesfield copies, which formed parts of two such sammelbands, are typical of the form in which the book survived in scholarly libraries. Single copies in their original vellum, complete with the two folding plates at pp. 18 and 81, are now exceptionally rare. The text itself was not reprinted in the seventeenth century — the Galilean telescope having been superseded after about 1640 by the Keplerian and astronomical instruments — and the eighteenth century preferred for its history of the telescope the more polished accounts of Boscovich, Bailly, and Delambre. Modern scholarship returned to Sirtori only with Edward Rosen’s The Naming of the Telescope of 1947, which read the book closely as a primary historical source, and with Albert Van Helden’s 1977 study, which used the autobiographical narrative as one of the foundations of his reconstruction of the early diffusion of the device. References: Brunet V, 403 — Carli and Favaro 75 — Honeyman 2854 — Macclesfield 838 & 839 (both sammelbands) — Riccardi I(ii) 461 — Sotheran, Second Supplement 3843 — Zinner, Bibl. 4681 & Instr. 536 — not in Cinti or Houzeau & Lancaster — Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx (2002) — Molesini on testing telescope optics of seventeenth-century Italy, in Van Helden et al. (eds.), The Origins of the Telescope (2010), 271–80 — Zuidervaart on the true inventor of the telescope, in the same volume, 9–44 — Rosen, The Naming of the Telescope (1947) — Van Helden on the invention of the telescope, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 67 (1977), 1–67 — Rössler on Sirturus, Zeitschrift für ophthalmologische Optik mit Einschluss der Instrumentenkunde 24 (1936), 1–17. 4to (195 × 150 mm), pp. [2], 3–75, 78–81, [1, blank], with two folding woodcut plates at pp. 18 and 81 (complete), woodcut device on title, woodcut diagrams in text (three full-page). Contemporary vellum.
Item #6588
Price: $85,000.00
