Sir William Lower may well have been indulging in a post-prandial snifter or two when he wrote of what he had seen through his "Dutch trunke". The moon's surface, the English nobleman reported in 1609, "appears like a tart that my cooke made me last weeke; here a vaine of bright stuffe, and there of darke, and so confusedlie all over." His enthusiasm was part of a craze for astronomical observation that swept Europe in the early 17th century following the invention of the telescope. The first mention of a "device for seeing things far away as if they were nearby" comes in a patent filed in 1608 by the optician Hans Lipperhey of the Dutch city of Middelburg. But why Middelburg, and why 1608? It turns out that wine - or at least, the need for exquisite glassware to hold it - had more than a little to do with it. The same pattern has been repeated throughout the telescope's history. Even today, we are looking at the universe through the bottom of a glass.
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