Sacharias Jansen - Inventions

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.

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