Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature

Galileo's demonstration of how his “perspective glasses” made it possible to read the letters engraved on the Lateran Palace was not the last time that the telescope was used as a reading device. Sixty years later, Robert Hooke and other members of the Royal Society of London engaged in a kind of reenactment of Galileo's demonstration. In February of 1671, Hooke suggested that telescopes might provide a way for “a very speedy conveyance of intelligence from place to place.” Taking this “ingenious” idea out on the banks of the Thames river, the Royal Society experimented with reading coded texts from one side of the river to the other, using “letters of a foot long, and glasses of two feet long.” If this incident suggests a remarkable persistence to fantasies about using telescopes to “read” the skies, most of Hooke's contemporaries would have associated him not with the sky-writing of the telescope but with an instrument that promised new “intelligence” on a much smaller scale: the microscope.

Hooke introduced the microscope to the English reading public by training his lens not on distant letters but on the text that he was creating with his new lenses. He initiates this study in his stunningly popular Micrographia (1665) by reading the minutest of points: “the mark of a full stop, or period.”