Comprehensive reading The History of Optics

The history of optics and optical devices begins in ancient Greece. The story of Archimedes, focusing the sun’s rays to win a battle for Syracuse in 213 BC is only a legend, reported centuries later. But in the Roman Empire, the philosopher, statesman and tragedian, Seneca noted the magnification of objects seen through water-filled transparent vessels, and his friend, the Emperor Nero, may have been the first to use a monocle, employing an emerald lens to view events in the Coliseum.

Spectacles, the first optical device, known also as eyeglasses, appeared first in Florence about 1280. The dispute exists over whether eyeglasses originated in the Far East or in the West: it appears that the eyeglasses used by the Chinese were for adornment or supposed magical powers and contained colored glass, not correcting lenses. And only in 1262 Roger Bacon, the medieval champion of experimental science, made the first recorded reference to the magnifying properties of lenses. In 1784 Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals. In his invention the two lens sections were hold by the frame. Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was among the few to accept the Copernican heliocentric astronomy and he discovered the laws of planetary motion, which set the path for Newton’s theory of gravitation. In the course of his astronomical investigations he provided a correct explanation of vision and the functions of the pupil, cornea and retina and gave the first correct explanation of how eyeglasses work.

By 1610, Galileo Galilei announced the telescopic observations of the moon and planets. One year earlier Galileo learned of the invention of the telescope by Hans Lippershey, who built a three-power instrument. His telescope was a simple refractor, employing two lenses in a tube. Galileo quickly improved his telescope to eight, twenty and then thirty power. These were the most powerful instruments of his time.

But a man not only wanted to admire distant stars through telescopes, but to make closer some minor things. The invention of the compound (twin lens) microscope at the end of the sixteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenths has been ascribed to the Dutch spectacle maker, Hans Jansen. The first great improvement was due to Robert Hooke, who in 1665 replaced the eyepiece with the twin-lens telescope eyepiece designed by Christaan Huygens. Hooke’s three-lens microscope is the basis for modern instruments.

Sir Isaac Newton, a great scientist and thinker, who discovered some of the fundamental laws of mechanics, is known also by his invention of the reflecting telescope. Newton defended the idea of corpuscular nature of light, which implied that light consists of distinct particles with immutable properties.

The shift to the wave explanation of the nature of light began at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1801 Thomas Young discovered the interference of light from adjacent pinholes and established the wave theory of light. The polarization of light was discovered in1808 by Malus and the polarizing angle was discovered by Brewster in 1811. In 1842, an Austrian physicist Johann Christian Dopler published a paper "Concerning the Colored Light of Double Stars" which first described how the frequency of light and sound is changed by the relative velocity of the source and observer.

The union of electromagnetic theory with optics began when Maxwell found that his equations for the electromagnetic field (1873) described waves travelling at the velocity of light and with the demonstrations that electromagnetic waves were refracted and reflected like light waves. The final mathematical identification of optics with electromagnetism was achieved in 1944.

In the 20^th century revolutionary advances in optics began with the construction of the first laser in 1960 and have led to the rapid development of optical communication systems, imaging systems and holography, optical data storage and retrieval systems, and optical processing.