In war, seeing is everything, and for more than 400 years militaries the world over have sought out new ways to scope out their enemies. Hans Lippershey, a Dutch spectacle maker, is credited with inventing the telescope (in 1608), but a prominent British science historian presented evidence in 1991 that Leonard Digges, an English mathematician and surveyor, had come up with a reflecting telescope sometime between 1540 and his death in 1559. As England lived in abject fear of a Spanish invasion, Digges’s invention may have been kept under wraps as a military secret, and England crushed Spain’s “Invincible Armada” when it finally arrived in 1588. As for Lippershey’s telescope, the Dutch tried to keep it a secret too, according to the late Archibald Roy, an astronomer at Glasgow University, correctly envisioning that “a general could overlook the whole field of battle with it.”
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This article appears in the Autumn 2020 issue (Vol. 33, No. 1) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: Now See Here
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