Eileen A. Reeves. Galileo's Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 232 pp. index. illus. $21.95. ISBN: 978–0–674–02667–4.

Abstract

The earliest encounters with the telescope, from the first application for a privilege by a spectacle-maker in Middelburg in September 1608 to the printing of the first celestial observations with this instrument in Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius in Venice in March 1610, have been construed in terms of breathtaking speed. Historians have marveled at the speed with which the instrument spread from Middelburg across Europe (for which the contingent fact of the whole world’s having gathered in its place of invention, the Netherlands, for a peace conference was helpful); at the speed with which Galileo rushed in to publication of his telescopic discoveries; and, finally, at the speed with which he continued his telescopic observations — not to speak of his unwillingness to share his telescopes with other astronomers — even after the publication of Sidereus Nuncius in order to monopolize all celestial discoveries yet to make. Nevertheless, as we all know too well, nothing travels as fast as rumors and gossip. This fastness is precisely at the root of the tardiness with which Galileo reacted to the invention of the telescope, as Eileen Reeves argues in her newest book, Galileo’s Glassworks. Reeves establishes that Galileo and his friend, Paolo Sarpi, already knew of the existence of the telescope by November 1608. But it was months before they were moved to action and tried to replicate the Dutch invention. Why? Reeves is not interested in sorting out the mere rumors from the hard historical facts. The strength of her approach in accounting for Galileo’s reluctance to become involved in the route that would bring him fame is that she convincingly shows that the miscontrual of historical events and facts, inherent in the circulation of gossip and rumors, shaped the thoughts and beliefs about the telescope that were the cause of Galileo’s otherwise strange idleness. The central argument of Reeves’s book is that Galileo let time pass because he had every reason to believe that the new story was but an old tale. He was convinced that a mirror was involved in the Dutch telescope.