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.
Optical microscope
Galileo Galilei is also sometimes cited as a compound microscope inventor. After 1610 he found that he could close focus his telescope to view small objects, such as flies, close up and/or could look through the wrong end in reverse to magnify small objects. The only drawback was that his 2 foot long telescope had to be extended out to 6 feet to view objects that close. After seeing the compound microscope built by Drebbel exhibited in Rome in 1624, Galileo built his own improved version. In 1625 Giovanni Faber coined the name "microscope" for the compound microscope Galileo submitted to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1624 (Galileo had called it the ""occhiolino"" or ""little eye""). Faber coined the name from the Greek words "μικρόν" (micron) meaning "small", and "σκοπεῖν" (skopein) meaning "to look at", a name meant to be analogous with "telescope", another word coined by the Linceans.