Inventions
By choosing the profession of spectacle-maker, Zacharias Jansen entered a very competitive and secretive trade. These factors may have played a role in Jansen's claims of invention of the telescope and the microscope since he and Middelburg spectacle maker Hans Lippershey were direct competitors who practically lived next door to each other. Jansen's attribution to these discoveries is debatable since there is no concrete evidence as to the actual inventor, and there are a whole series of confusing and conflicting claims from the testimony of his children and friends, in different investigations that took place 20 to 65 years after the claimed invention.
Read more about this topic: Sacharias Jansen
Famous quotes containing the word inventions:
“I’m afraid for all those who’ll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines.... What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.”
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“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”
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