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
Hans Lippershey Hans Lippershey Hans Lippershey (1570 – buried 29 September 1619), also known as Johann Lippershey or Lipperhey, was a German-Dutch spectacle-maker. He is commonly associated with the invention of the telescope, because he was the first one who tried to obtain a patent for it. It is, however, unclear if he was the first one to build a telescope. Lippershey was born in Wesel, now in western Germany, in 1570. He settled in Middelburg, the capital of the province of Zeeland, now in the Netherlands, in 1594, married the same year and became a citizen of Zeeland in 1602. During