Prinsenhof - Wandeling Delft

PRINSENHOF – THE OLDEST TELESCOPE

Walk past the statue of ‘Geertruyt van Oosten 1330-1358’ and cross the bridge. If you walk through the gate, you’ll come to the Museum Prinsenhof and the Prinsenkwartier.

A unique discovery from the city canal, 2014
Although the telescope that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) built in 1609 allowed him to explore the heavens and make his revolutionary discoveries, a year earlier, it had been Han Lipperhey (1570-1619) who had sought a patent for a ‘certain instrument for seeing long distances’. He was the first to understand the principle of the telescope with two lenses, and produced a working model. Nothing remains of what he produced, but we do have his patent application. In 2014, however, a 12-cm-long, ugly tube of copper-plated iron, completely consistent with Lipperhey’s design, was by chance fished out of Delft’s city canal. The tube can be considered the oldest telescope in the Netherlands.

Delft rapidly became a centre for lens-grinders and makers of telescopes and microscopes. Telescopes were being produced in Delft as early as 1609. They were probably made by Evert Harmanz Steenwijk, a lens-grinder in Delft.

Johan van der Wyck, a military engineer who had settled in Delft in 1650, established himself as an internationally-celebrated manufacturer of telescopes and microscopes. Antoni would marry three years later, and set up a shop selling linen, yarn and ribbon. The telescope and microscope-makers Evert Harmanz Steenwijk and Johan van der Wyck lived and worked around the corner from Van Leeuwenhoek.