-
Feb 20, 1450
Printing Press
The Gutenberg press with its wooden and later metal movable type printing brought down the price of printed materials and made such materials available for the masses. -
Feb 20, 1504
The first Portable Time Piece
the first portable (but not very accurate) timepiece was invented in Nuremberg, Germany by Peter Henlein. -
Feb 25, 1553
Michael Servetus
A man of religious conviction, Michael Servetus proposed a radical new theory concerning the pulmonary circulation of the blood, a theory motivated in part by esoteric theological concerns involving the trinity. Servetus was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake in Geneva by the religious reformer, John Calvin. -
Feb 25, 1577
The Comet of 1577
Made famous by Tycho Brahe, and again challenging a central tenet inherited from Aristotle, that the celestial spheres were 'solid' perhaps even crystalline. Because the path of the comet seemed to many astronomers to be above the sphere of the moon (that is, superlunary) the apparent path of the comet would 'shatter' anything in its path. If Tycho's observations 'shattered the crystalline spheres' then a reasonable question might be 'What moves the planets'. -
Compound Microscope
Sometime about the year 1590, two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans started experimenting with these lenses. They put several lenses in a tube and made a very important discovery. The object near the end of the tube appeared to be greatly enlarged, much larger than any simple magnifying glass could achieve by itself! They had just invented the compound microscope (which is a microscope that uses two or more lenses). -
The First Thermometer
Galileo invented the first thermometer. He was a famous Italian Mathematician and Scientist whose inventions and mathematical theories are still in use today. The basic principle behind a thermometer, the expansion of air by heat and contraction by cold, was know many hundreds of years earlier. As far back as 300 B.C. experiments of Philo of Byzantium illustrated this principle. Along with Galileo, several other scientists developed better and more accurate thermometers. They were Marin Mersenne -
Gresham College
Gresham College, founded by the London merchant Sir Thomas Gresham, was designed to provide public lectures on a variety of subjects from astronomy and geometry to concerns in medicine. By one tradition, Gresham College was a key gathering place for the core group that founded the Royal Society of London -
The Telescope
The telescope was invented in the Netherlands; it employs a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. -
Galileo Galilei
Constructs his first telescope and turns it toward the heavens; his instruments begin at magnifications of approximately 3X and 10X, the most powerful achieving a magnification of 30X, an instrument he eventually gave away as a gift. -
Galiloe Published His Telescope
In his highly influential Sidereal Messenger, Galileo Galilei publishes his telescopic findings with subtle Copernican twists. Among his observations, Galileo argues there are innumerable stars invisible to the naked eye, mountains on the Moon (which he eventually measures), and four moons circling Jupiter. These observations were made for the most part in 1609; later in 1610 Galileo observes the phases of Venus, which suggested to him that waning and waxing planet must circle the Sun. Further,
