Admiral's Brass Spyglass Telescope 32" w/ Rosewood Box

Though antique telescopes were not invented and fully put to use until the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries, the notion of using lenses to magnify objects dates to ancient times. Glass lenses were originally discovered by the Phoenecians, as described by Pliny, around 5000 BC when cooking fires on the desert sand caused the sand to melt. The earliest known magnifying lens is from 750 BC from the Assyrian palace of Nimrud. Along with these earliest glass lenses, natural crystal lenses have been used since before recorded history, and it was these crystal lenses that were used in the earliest model antique telescopes. By the 12^th Century reading stones were documented throughout Europe, and in the 14^th Century spectacles were invented in Northern Italy, with convex lenses designed to correct for far sightedness. Within a hundred years the invention of concave lenses in spectacles allowed for correction in near sightedness. While antique telescopes were still a century away from creation, and telescope brass had yet to be implemented, the idea for such a device was mentioned in the 13^th Century by English Philosopher Roger Bacon. In his treatise Opus Majus, Bacon makes mention of several “transparent bodies” being arranged “with respect to our sight and objects of vision, that the rays will be deflected and bent in any direction,” so that  “we may see the object near or at a distance.” This treatise may have been one of the first written descriptions of the concept that would later become the spyglass telescope.