RIFLESCOPES
In this Year of Our Lord 2016, the riflescope, or telescopic sight, is so commonplace that we hardly give it a second thought. However, although such sights were used by the military as long ago as the American Civil War (1861-1865) and afterwards by buffalo hunters in support of the government’s policy to bring the Plains Indians to heel by slaughtering their food supply, their everyday use on sporting rifles is much more recent.
But let us start at the very beginning…
Telescopes use a series of curved lenses to magnify the image passing through them. However, the lens itself is far older than the telescope, having been invented in Italy towards the end of the 13th century and used to make spectacles of a primitive kind for monks and other scholars. To put that into its historical perspective, that was the time of the last Crusade.
Telescope concept
Some 300 years later, just after the death of our first Queen Elizabeth, a number of big names, including Galileo and Isaac Newton, were associated, wrongly, with the invention of the telescope. Galileo and Newton certainly developed the concept but the original idea seems to have come from a German spectacle maker named Hans Lippershey or Lipperhey, who was living and working in Holland. Lippershey was inspired, so it is said, by seeing his children playing with two lenses and finding that they magnified the image far more than with a single lens. One wonders why that took more than 300 years, but there you go!
Lippershey filed a patent application with the Dutch patent office in 1608. Another Dutch spectacle maker, Jacob Metius, applied for a similar patent a few weeks later, but in the end the patent office refused both on the grounds that the idea was so simple that any lens maker could do it. Lippershey, whose application was the earliest, was rewarded with a government contract to supply telescopes and he later produced models with two scopes side by side. Enter the binocular.
At that time the Dutch were a vigorous naval nation with huge possessions overseas. As a legacy of their East Indies adventures, they still make the world’s best cigars and coffee, but in the 17th century the competition led to war with England on several occasions. So perhaps I may be allowed to wonder if their possession of naval telescopes helped their daring attack on the English fleet in the Medway in 1667. The Dutch virtually destroyed the fleet and captured two ships of the line, including Charles II’s flagship. Possibly the most comprehensive defeat ever suffered by the Royal Navy. The English fleet was laid up and virtually unmanned at the time, but it was still a remarkable feat of arms and navigation, probably only made possible because the Dutch were aided by a Thames pilot, the appropriately named Robert Holland, who had defected to them.
Please pardon the ramblings of a retired sailor as we return to the main story.
George Wallace takes a look at the history of the telescopic sight and how it was eventually used on rifles
Riflescopes
Those original telescopes were purely instruments of observation and it was another couple of hundred years before it became possible to mount them on artillery pieces – removed before the gun was fired – and rifles. Experiments had been ongoing ever since the telescope