The precise sequence of the invention of the telescope (and its early diffusion) remains cloudy: as an intellectual historian, the main issues revolve more around how the key ideas flowed – and, indeed, what ideas were even possible at different times.
I also have a professional interest in lens technologies, and so was fascinated when I recently came across a blog entry giving a French account of the invention of CinemaScope. Without knowing much about the subject, you might guess that it had perhaps been the brainchild of some curiously unfeted American inventor not long before its 1952/1953 debut? Nope, not even close. As even Wikipedia gets right, a “Hypergonar” system based on a distorting lens had been constructed by Professor Henri Chrétien in the 1920s. This was first used commercially by Claude Autant-Lara in 1929 (though only for a couple of months, before the other Parisian film-palaces had it shut down for making them look uncompetitive).
Autant-Lara then got hired by Metro-Goldwyn in 1931, took a number of Hypergonar lenses over to Culver City, waited, waited some more, before finally being told that the system “is of no interest and has no future”. It was only when “This Is Cinerama” opened in New York in 1952 (and caused a public sensation) did film studios start to look at anamorphic wide-screen technologies once more… and all of a sudden Chrétien’s lenses became the order of the day.
But Chrétien didn’t himself invent anamorphic lenses: he had merely “corrected and improved” the basic design from “the work of a German physicist of the 1880s named Lubke” (according to Autant-Lara, when interviewed in 1967). Others had done the same, most notably Professor Ernst Abbe and the Zeiss Company in Germany in 1898 (who called their system “Anamorphot”). In fact, the first patent on anamorphic lenses was far older, going back to Sir David Brewster in 1862 or earlier.
It would be nice to find out if there was anything written on Lubke, as he would seem to be the missing link in this story: however, a quick online search for 19th century German physicists called Lubke / Lübke turned up nothing useful. If anyone wants to pursue this elusive person, I would suggest looking at two publications by Francoise Le Guet Tully, both listed on the French Wikipedia page for Henri Chrétien:-
If both of those fail to please, then perhaps you might look at a biographical dictionary of German scientists, and/or find out where Henri Chrétien’s papers are held (I already asked about the latter on HASTRO-L, because Chrétien is also famous for having been behind a design that is used by nearly all top-end optical telescopes).
To me, the mainstream history of the telescope circa 1608 comes over very much as if you were looking at the “invention” of anamorphic cinema circa 1927: though it was very much “in the air” (and so pretty much anyone could have invented it), the simple reason that it was in the air at all was because the basic technological notion had already had more than 50 years of subtle circulation.
Fascinating… Lubke becomes the Baresch (Barschius?) of moviemaking.
Pretty much! 🙂
I suppose what interests me most about the Voynich Manuscript is its invention, rather than its dissemination. And, as with most inventions, the questions then reduce to “what was the context, and what was the need?”