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.
History of the telescope
In 1995 this imaging technique was demonstrated on an array of separate optical telescopes for the first time, allowing a further improvement in resolution, and also allowing even higher resolution imaging of stellar surfaces. The same techniques have now been applied at a number of other astronomical telescope arrays including: the Navy Prototype Optical Interferometer, the CHARA array, and the IOTA array. A detailed description of the development of astronomical optical interferometry can be found here [https://www.webcitation.org/5kmngkBFy?url=http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/2309/page1.html