Before Mars rovers, Apollo Missions and the International Space Station there was the telescope. The devices, which first appeared in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, were mankind’s first technological step in exploring the universe.

Now Marvin Bolt, science and technology curator at the Corning Museum of Glass, is on a worldwide quest to track down the world’s oldest known telescopes.

“You’d think after 400 years, people would know where they are,” Bolt, an expert on historical telescopes, told Phys.org.

The quest began in Switzerland one night when a friend let him look through a 17th century telescope. According to Bolt, writings suggested that the antique telescopes didn’t work well, but that was not his experience.

“The image was spectacular and not as people had described it,” he said.
“That was the turning point. We have to make a systematic study of actual objects: Where are they? How many are there and what can you actually see through them?”

In total, his quest has taken him to 21 countries so far including Portugal, Estonia, china and the Vatican as he chased leads through private and museum collections in Europe, Asia and North America.

To date he has catalogued more than 1,000 telescopes made before 1750 when a second piece of glass was added, improving the quality and leading to a surge in demand and production.

According to the telescope hunter, that number is more than he anticipated. Early telescopes were fragile things, involving delicate glass lenses rolled in parchment and covered in fish skin or leather.

At the start of Bolt’s project, fewer than 10 telescopes manufactured between 1608 and 1650 were known to exist. In his search, Bolt has turned up 30 including two that were found in a decorative arts museum in Germany.

At a similar museum in Berlin they found a telescope which dates to 1620, one of the oldest surviving telescopes in the world. Another 17th century telescope was collecting dust on a shelf in Belgium.

A telescope from 1710 was found in East Lansing, Michigan. A young girl who was sick in bed with chicken pox, poked her finger through the wallpaper and found it hidden in the wall.

Bolt and his colleague Michael Korey, curator at the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden, estimate that there are another 300 to 400 telescopes from the era waiting to be discovered.

According to the researchers, the more telescopes they find the more they learn about the evolution of the technology.

Although most of the telescopes remain where he found them, Bolt plans to publish an online public database of the instruments. He plans to include photos of the instruments, photos of the views through them and additional information.

“Before the telescope, you can think of humanity as being in a room in the middle of the day, but with all the blinds drawn, so your view is limited to the walls in the room and your understanding of the world around you is minimal. After the telescope, it’s as if somebody opened up all the blinds and you can look out and see this wide world that you had no idea even existed. Suddenly, the earth was not the center of the universe,” said Bart Fried, founder and president of the Antique Telescope Society.