Who invented the Telescope?

Although many people claimed at the time to be the inventor of the telescope, the earliest examples are credited to a German spectacle maker called Hans Lippershey. The story goes that one day in 1608 his apprentice was amusing himself with lenses and found a combination that made things seem closer. When Lippershey was shown this combination, he enclosed the lenses at two ends of a tube, and the refracting telescope was born.

The following year Galileo Galilei, using a vague description of Lippershey's device, made a telescope with 3x magnification (he would later achieve 30x) and started observing the heavens. This in turn led to the publication of Sidereus Nuncius ( Starry Messenger) in 1610 and the beginning of his clash with the church that ended with a trial for heresy in 1633 and his house arrest until his death in 1642 aged 77.