History of the telescope received the report in November, and the English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot, who used a six-powered telescope by the summer of 1609 to observe features on the moon. The Italian polymath Galileo Galilei was in Venice in June 1609 and there heard of the "Dutch perspective glass" by means of which distant objects appeared nearer and larger. Galileo states that he solved the problem of the construction of a telescope the first night after his return to Padua from Venice and made his first telescope the next day by fitting a convex lens in one extremity of a leaden
The Man Who Sold the Moon The Man Who Sold the Moon "The Man Who Sold the Moon" is a science fiction novella by American author Robert A. Heinlein, written in 1949 and published in 1950. A part of his "Future History" and prequel to "Requiem", it covers events around a fictional first Moon landing in 1978 and the schemes of Delos D. Harriman, a businessman who is determined to personally reach and control the Moon. Delos David "D. D." Harriman, "the last of the Robber Barons", is obsessed with being the first to travel to—and possess—the moon. He asks his business partner, George Strong, and