A childhood interest in optics, which he fed by playing with lenses and mirrors, eventually inspired Asad Mehmood to start making telescopes.
“I not only bought lenses from optics shops but more frequently I got magnifying glasses from bookstores. Then I bought a toy telescope, checked out its internals and made another one identical to it.”
The success of this first invention spurred him on. Not content with toy telescopes, he says, “that was when there rose in me the ambition to build a telescope to view the sky and the moon, the stars and planets.”
First, he made a version of the Galilean telescope, the model the famous Italian astronomer used to observe the moon and sunspots. Then Asad moved on to study the model that Isaac Newton designed. But Newton, a genius at optics, not only ground his own lenses, he also made his own parabolic mirrors–something not easy to acquire in Pakistan and not easy to make oneself.
As Hameed points out, Asad probably would have been frustrated at this point in his project without the help of a local science society. In Asad’s case, it was the Khwarizmi Science Society, members of which helped him find the materials he needed to make parabolic mirrors.
His finished model now can magnify images up to 300 times the size visible to the naked eye.
No one in Pakistan had ever built this kind of telescope before, according to the Tribune story. But for Hameed, Asad’s story more importantly underscores the need for more science societies in Islamic countries to encourage students to take up science as a career.