History of the telescope
The earliest known telescope appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands when an eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey tried to obtain a patent on one. Although Lippershey did not receive his patent, news of the new invention soon spread across Europe. The design of these early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. Galileo improved on this design the following year and applied it to astronomy. In 1611, Johannes Kepler described how a far more useful telescope could be made with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens and by 1655 astronomers such as Christiaan Huygens were building powerful but unwieldy Keplerian telescopes with compound eyepieces.
Newton's reflector
There has been much confusion and dispute concerning the telescopes that Newton built, but it is now clear that his first telescope was a prototype that he constructed in 1668. This was seen only by a few friends at Cambridge and very little is known of it. This prototype had a mirror a little over an inch in diameter, probably 1.3 inches, and around 6 inches in length. Newton seldom referred to this prototype in later years and so his second scope is often called his first.