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.
Craig telescope
It was the largest refracting telescope (a telescope with a lens) in the world from 1852 to 1857, erected near London, England. It was a great refractor, a large refracting telescope with an achromatic doublet with an aperture of 61 cm (2 feet (24 inches)) and that was completed in 1852 in Wandsworth Common and dismantled around 1857 (although the brick tower probably survived until 1870). It had a focal length of 76–83 feet. Its namesake, the Rev. John Craig, spent a small fortune to produce a uniquely designed telescope with nearly double the aperture of the next largest refracting telescopes, making it the largest refracting telescope in the World for the better part of a decade. However, it had problem with its lens figuring starting from its first light in the summer of 1852. It soon fell into disuse as that same year Craig lost his only son, then his wife in 1854, and lost his brother and was put in jail for 6 weeks in 1856.