Jacob (Jacobus; sometimes James) Metius (after 1571–1628) was a Dutch instrument-maker and a specialist in grinding
lenses. He is primarily known for the
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
application he made for an
optical telescope
An optical telescope gathers and focus (optics), focuses light mainly from the visible spectrum, visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, to create a magnification, magnified image for direct visual inspection, to make a photograph, or to co ...
in October 1608, a few weeks after
Hans Lippershey submitted a patent for the same device. He was the brother of the geometer and astronomer
Adriaan Metius.
Biography
Little is known of Jacob Metius other than he lived his life in
Alkmaar
Alkmaar () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Netherlands, located in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of North Holland. Alkmaar is well known fo ...
. His father was
Adriaan Anthonisz, a mathematician/map-maker/military engineer and Alkmaar
burgomaster, and his brother was Adriaan Metius. Jacob's date of birth was some time after his brother's (1571). He died in Alkmaar, his death date usually given in sources as 1628 although some put it between 1624 and 1631.
Invention of the telescope
In October 1608, the
States General discussed Jacob Metius's patent application for a device for "seeing faraway things as though nearby", consisting of a convex and concave lens in a tube, and the combination magnified three or four times. His use of a convex
objective lens and concave
eyepiece may have been a superior design to the Lippershey telescope design which was submitted for patent only a few weeks before Metius'.
Metius informed the States General that he was familiar with the secrets of
glassmaking and that he could make an even better telescope with the government's support. The States General voted him a small award, although it ended up employing Lippershey to make binocular versions of the telescope. Metius is described as feeling rebuffed by the States General, withdrawing his patent, and not allowing anyone to see his telescope. His
will and testament
A will and testament is a legal document that expresses a person's (testator) wishes as to how their property (estate (law), estate) is to be distributed after their death and as to which person (executor) is to manage the property until its fi ...
ordered that all his tools and designs be destroyed to prevent anyone else from profiting from them.
There is a claim by Johannes Zachariassen,
Zacharias Janssen's son, that Janssen had invented the telescope and that (Adriaan) Metius and
Cornelis Drebbel had bought a telescope from him and his father in 1620 and copied it, although this claim is put in doubt since Adriaen Metius was using telescopes by 1613, Drebbel had described them in 1609, and Jacob Metius had tried to patent one in 1608.
[Albert Van Helden, Sven Dupre, Rob Van Gent, ''The Origins of the Telescope'', 2011, page 43]
- Huib Zuidervaart, ''The 'true inventor' of the telescope. A survey of 400 years of debate'', KNAW Press, 2012, page 24
See also
*
List of astronomical instrument makers
References
"What do we know about Metius?"
''The Galileo Project''
Archimedes Project: Hutton, Charles Mathematical and Philosophical Dictionary 1795
* Daniel J. Boorstin, ''The Discoverers'' (New York: Random House, 1983), 315.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Metius, Jacob
1570s births
1628 deaths
Optical engineers
People from Alkmaar
17th-century Dutch inventors
Dutch scientific instrument makers