Roger Bacon has been often credited with several inventions, including the telescope and working spectacles, although these are much debated. He was, however, one of the first Europeans to theorize about both of these inventions--certainly as early as 1234 in regard to telescopic lenses and 1268 in regard to corrective lenses--long before Galileo, who is also often credited considerably later with the telescope. It is most likely that the glassmaker Abbas ibn Firnas in the ninth century and the polymath Ibn al-Haytham in the eleventh century should be credited with inventing early versions of corrective lenses, and in Italy Salvino d'Armate produced one of the earliest wearable spectacles around 1280, along with alternate credit also given to Fra Alessandro da Spina of Pisa about the same time, both not long after Bacon, who may have influenced them. Bacon's own words in De iride (on the rainbow) around 1235 suggest that lenses enable one "to correctly read the tiniest letters at very great distances." This does seem an ambiguous possible precedent for both spectacles and telescopes. Working telescopes seem to appear only after 1608 in northern European workshops of Hans Lippershey, Zacharias Janssen, and Jacob Metius almost simultaneously. Nonetheless, as a pioneer in optics, Bacon did make and use optical lenses. He was also probably the first European to fairly correctly theorize and describe the visible light spectrum as it is known today, which is a considerable achievement in itself.

By experimental observation, Bacon correctly observed the breaking up and separation of sunlight through water and the prism derived from it. Refraction of sunlight was not well known in Europe, described by Arab opticians like the eleventh century Ibn al-Haytham, whose Kit3b al-man3zir (wr. 1011-1021; book of optics) Bacon read carefully. However, Bacon described the range of colored light as progressing from red hues through orange, yellow and green to blue and violet hues, what we now understand as the visible infrared to ultraviolet range (650-350 nanometers in reverse order). In addition, Bacon also correctly measured the maximum altitude of the angle of intensity as around 42œ, which could only have been understood by direct observation and 67empirical experimentation over multiple, repeated events. Thus, Bacon long anticipated Sir Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) prism experiments and the phenomenon Newton named the spectrum.

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