Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.15841

    Reflecting telescope

    Date
    6 January 1672
    Creator
    Henry Oldenburg (1612 - 1677, German) , Scientific correspondent
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p3
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 263mm
    width (page): 213mm
    Subject
    Content object
    Description
    Drawing of Isaac Newton's improvements to the reflecting telescope. Henry Oldenburg made this drawing and sent it to Isaac Newton in a letter, asking him to review and correct it before it was sent on to Christian Huygens to secure Newton's priority for the invention. The two small crowns are on a separate piece of paper that has been attached on to the larger drawing; they are meant to demonstrate the magnification ability of the telescope.

    This image is copied in RBO/4/122, LBO/5/098a and LBC/5/110a. It was also published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in March 1672.
    Object history
    At the meeting of the Royal Society on 11 January 1672, ‘Mr. Isaac Newton was elected. [...] Mention was made of Mr. Newton’s improvement of telescopes by contracting them; and that that, which had sent to the Society of that kind to be examined, had been by the king, and considered also by the president, Sir Robert Moray, Sir Paul Neile, Dr. Christopher Wren, and Mr. Hooke at Whitehall; and that they had so good opinion of it, as they concluded, that a description and scheme of it should be sent by the secretary in a letter to Mons. Huygens then at Paris, thereby to secure this contrivance to the author, who had also written a letter to Mr. Oldenburg from Cambridge, dated January 6, 1671/2, altering and enlarging the description of his instrument, which had been sent him for his review, before it should go abroad. This description was read, and ordered to be entered, together with the scheme, in the Register Book’ (Birch 3:1). Newton’s letter is printed in Birch 3:2-4.

    Tab. 1, figs 1-3, in Isaac Newton, 'A new catadioptrical telescope', Phil. Trans. vol. 7, no. 81 (March 1672), pp. 4004-10 (ref. to figs 1 and 2 at pp. 4004-05).
    Related fellows
    Henry Oldenburg (1612 - 1677, German) , Scientific correspondent
    Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727, British) , Natural philosopher
    Associated place
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