Origin and Design
It is hard to classify the Dobsonian Telescope as a single invention. In the field of amateur telescope making most, if not all, of its design features had been used before. John Dobson, credited as having invented this design in the 1950s, points out that "for hundreds of years, wars were fought using cannon on 'Dobsonian' mounts". Dobson himself identified the characteristic features of the design as lightweight objective mirrors made of porthole glass, and mountings constructed from plywood, Teflon strips and other low-cost materials. Since he built these telescopes as aids in his avocation of instructional sidewalk astronomy, he prefers to call the design a "sidewalk telescope". It appears that John Dobson simply combined all these innovations in a design that is focused towards one goal: building a very large, inexpensive, easy to use, portable telescope for the sole purpose of visual observing of astronomical objects as a way to bring astronomy to the masses.
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