Hans Lippershey that time he became a master lens grinder and spectacle maker and established a shop. He remained in Middelburg until his death, in September 1619. Hans Lippershey is known for the earliest written record of a refracting telescope, a patent he filed in 1608. His work with optical devices grew out of his work as a spectacle maker, an industry that had started in Venice and Florence in the thirteenth century, and later expanded to the Netherlands and Germany. Lippershey applied to the States General of the Netherlands on 2 October 1608 for a patent for his instrument ""for seeing
Zacharias Janssen Eventually, the case was dismissed. Janssen returned to Middleburg in 1621. Janssen's life was documented by the many investigations on the subject before the Second World War. Many of the Middelburg archives were destroyed by a bombing of Middelburg on May 17, 1940, during the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Without these earlier studies, very little would be known of Janssen's life at all because all original files were lost in the fires following the bombardment. Zacharias Janssen Zacharias Janssen (also Zacharias Jansen or Sacharias Jansen) (1585 – pre-1632) was a Dutch spectacle-maker from Middelburg associated with the invention of