Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Did Columbus have a Telescope? Discuss.

Yeah, thought about putting this in the bad questions thread, but it is my own question.

Which I answered simply with a NO.

Telescopes: pretty much invented 1608.
(Galileo used his in the 1600s)

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

But he is (in my mind) pictured with some kind of tube-mounted optical aid. Did he have something like that, and if so, What is that called?
Magnification devices were around in the 1400's but I think these were not yet termed telescopes, if they were even set in tubes.

Thoughts? Links? I googled around for a while but was surprised to see no definitive answer for this seemingly simple question.

thanks!

I think he's pictured with a telescope sometimes, but it's an anachronism. Can you find a pre-1600s picture of him with a telescope or similar object? (ETA: I stand corrected. )

Old optical telescopes, of the kind you might picture a pirate or other seagoing person using in the days of sailing ships, are sometimes called spyglasses.

The only thing like an optical tool Columbus would have used is a quadrant... which doesn't necessarily use a tube at all. Usually they just had two holes you would look through to line them up. Once you lined them up, a plumb bob hanging in front of a quarter circle (from whence the quadrant gets its name) with angle markings would give the angle to whatever you're looking at. It was used for primitive celestial navigation, and from all accounts, Columbus was terrible at it, even by the standards of the time.

Mostly he navigated by dead-reckoning, which basically means plotting your location by calculating hourly vectors for speed and direction. Direction was measured with the compass, and speed was measured by tossing flotsam overboard, and counting how long it took to pass it. Accuracy, needless to say, was rather low.

The likely explanation for the image you have of him looking through an optical device is anachronism. Artists of later eras who wished to romanticize his image would have likely included navigational tools (telescope, sextant) of later times. That's why they were artists, and not navigators.

I don't know, but we visited the life size replicas of his boats in Corpus Christi recently and I was surprised to see that the floor was a steep arch, so that water rolled off the sides of the boat. Also they were tiny for being transatlantic vessels. I also read a fiction recently called "The Diaries of Mrs. Columbus" that suggested Christipher Columbus' talent was in making detailed maps of Africa's coast. That showcased his geography talent enough to convince Ferdinand to finance his venture. That was a historical romance novel, so who knows how it really happened.

I read that he didn't even use the stars much, one of the two main ways of navigating; he was a 'dead reckoning' man, as noted by Dude, and from his ship logs, sounds that way.

His birthday is Halloween, another fun fact.

thanks also to Dude re: 'quadrant', gotta look that up, sounds interesting. Yeah, the dead reckoning sounds like it might account for Columbus coming up a tad short of China/India but still thinking he was there!

thanks all!