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:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“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)