Sir Isaac Newton
(4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727)
inventor of the reflecting telescope
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From Wikipedia:
From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics. During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that a prism could decompose white light into a spectrum of colours, and that a lens and a second prism could recompose the multicoloured spectrum into white light.
He also showed that the colored light does not change its properties, by separating out a colored beam and shining it on various objects. Newton noted that regardless of whether it was reflected or scattered or transmitted, it stayed the same color. Thus the colors we observe are the result of how objects interact with the incident already-colored light, not the result of objects generating the color.
From this work he concluded that any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours, and invented a reflecting telescope (today known as a Newtonian telescope) to bypass that problem. By grinding his own mirrors, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes, he was able to produce a superior instrument to the refracting telescope, due primarily to the wider diameter of the mirror.
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A replica of Isaac Newton's telescope of 1672. This replica is in the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. |
This was a new design of telescope - the Newtonian reflector. At 6 inches in diameter, it was also one of the largest telescope of its day. Newton's work on optics and splitting white light, led him to believe that all refracting telescopes would suffer from chromatic aberration. His new design of reflecting telescope minimised this problem. However, due to problems with accurately grinding the mirror, Newton's telescope actually caused more image distortions than other contemporary telescope and more than a century passed before reflecting telescope became popular.
Newton presented the original telescope to the Royal Society in 1672 and was admitted as a fellow of the society in the same year.
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