title: Galileo's Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror
author: Eileen Reeves
description: Galileo is mistakenly believed by many to have invented the telescopea misconception that the scientist did little to correct in his own time. Rather, as Reeves, an associate professor of comp lit at Princeton, reminds readers in reviewing both the myths and facts of telescopy, Galileo perfected a relatively crude Dutch invention that he had gotten wind of. It was his improved version, which he christened a telescope, that he used to discover the four large moons around Jupiter and the topography of the Earth's moon. However, as Reeves recounts, reports of magical mirrors and lenses dated back to the lighthouse of ancient Alexandria, which according to legend, was topped by an enormous mirror that could spy enemy ships and set them on fire. Stories circulated about other cultures, often Eastern, whose rulers used mirrors to keep a watchful eye on their citizens and spot invaders from afar. The English friar and scientist Francis Bacon intrigued generations with stories of marvelous looking glasses and a mirror that Julius Caesar supposedly used to observe the coast of England from France. In Galileo's time, the author reports, many scientists and amateurs were experimenting with optics and purloining each other's results in a complex game of cross-national thievery. Reeves's study is a skillful interpretative blend of legend, history and science about lenses, mirrors and their conjoining in the telescope. 5 illus. <i>(Jan.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Infrastructure
  Computer Vision
  Edited by
  Ioannis Brilakis
  Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge,
  Cambridge, United Kingdom
  Carl Haas
  Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
  University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
  
  Foreword
  Construction and management of infrastructure systems regularly uses artiﬁ-
  cial vision. It promises to become even more important in the next few decades
  as a critical technology to improve the efﬁciency and effectiveness of our
  infrastructure services. This “Infrastructure Computer Vision” book is a
  welcome synthesis of the techniques and applications of such artiﬁcial
  perception for anyone interested in or working with infrastructure.
  Artiﬁcial vision has a long and beneﬁcial history. Eyeglass lenses ﬁrst
  appeared around 1300 to provide corrected vision for a myriad of grateful
  people. Galileo used crystalline lenses to create a telescope and began viewing
  celestial objects in 1609 (unfortunately to his eventual peril). Use of this same
  len