Following on from my September 2008 article in History Today, I’ve just posted up an online Juan Roget bibliography listing the current set of primary, secondary, and tertiary references to Girolamo Sirtori’s claim to have met the “first inventor” of the telescope in Gerona.
While my article received a lot of positive attention from the Spanish media (which was nice, particularly being interviewed in the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford for TVE-1), I did however get quite a bit of negative attention (mainly online) from a few Spanish academics, who felt that I was somehow hijacking Simon de Guilleuma’s original 1959 research, which they claimed was well-known in Spanish history of astronomy reference works – and that I wasn’t actually offering anything new.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t think this criticism is really very fair. I made it completely clear in my article that it was Simon de Guilleuma’s dogged research from half a century ago that formed the central core of the whole story, and that my relatively modest contribution was limited to suggesting plausible transmission mechanisms by which (a) the Spanish telescope became the Frankfurt telescope, and (b) the Frankfurt telescope then begat the Dutch spyglass. In short, I tried to find a sensible explanation that not only engaged with all the confusing documentary evidence (without being unduly selective, as is too often the case), but also didn’t seek to reduce the parentage of the telescope to some kind of arbitrary quasi-nationalistic either-or choice.
My belief is simply that Simon de Guilleuma did not, some thirty years before Albert van Helden’s exemplary “The Invention of the Telescope” was published, have access to all the relevant documentary sources. If he had, I am quite sure that he would have been happy to suggest a more complete historical narrative broadly along the lines that I proposed.
Even if my hypothesis turns out to be wrong, I do think that it will be (what I call) “the right kind of wrong”: which is to say that the narrative that ultimately emerges will likely be a similar kind of synthesis (as opposed to a set of theses and antitheses). To an intellectual historian such as me, the mainstream’s Lipperhey-vs-Janssen-vs-Metius framework yields answers that are “the wrong kind of wrong” – a false choice between three historically implausible narratives, where none of them sits comfortably with the rest of the evidence.