This site DID support my National Geographic Expedition Granted entry “Build the Bourne Telescope!”   However, the video didn’t pass muster at National Geographic for the pot of loot they were offering, so now this is all you get!

Here is the 2 minute video that attempted to explain many things.  Please excuse the glossed over details.  You might find it interesting:

What I want to do:

I wish to build a telescope per the design carefully described by William Bourne in his 1580  letter to Queen Elizabeth’s closest advisor, Lord Burghley .  In the letter he:

– outlines the principles of optics,

– describes how to grind a “perspective glass” (a very large lens with a very long focal length),

– offers the idea to combing this glass with a concave looking glass to make a “proportional glass” to magnify distant objects,

– notes the military importance of the device,

– and dismisses his own knowledge of the practical aspects of its use and making, but points to John Dee and Thomas Digges as the REAL experts.

This letter was written 28 YEARS before the telescope was ‘invented’ in the Netherlands in 1608!  

When I found this letter via Google and Archives.org … I was jaw drop astonished.

Using modern materials, I built a 1/2 scale model of the telescope, with astounding results, as seen in the video.   These results have fueled the need for my expedition to:

1.  Travel to England to research the glass technology available in Bourne’s time.   Find examples and study it’s form, clarity, refractivity, etc.  If time is available, I will travel to Cornwall where this device may have been deployed and to  areas where Bourne, Dee, and Digges lived and worked for clues of its existence.

2.  Return to Boston and work with local artisans to make the glass in the Elizabethan way, grind the great perspective glass; blow, silver and cut the mirror; and construct at least one telescope.

3.  Return to England, to set up the telescope and observe ships at sea.

4.  And, if appropriate, donate the telescope to the Greenwich Observatory or other agency that might best make use of it.