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
A Trip to the Moon Porter said that it was by seeing "A Trip to the Moon" and other Méliès films that he "came to the conclusion that a picture telling a story might draw the customers back to the theatres, and set to work in this direction." Similarly, D. W. Griffith said simply of Méliès: "I owe him everything." Since these American directors are widely credited with developing modern film narrative technique, the literary and film scholar Edward Wagenknecht once summed up Méliès's importance to film history by commenting that Méliès "profoundly influenced both Porter and Griffith and through them the whole course of