Invention Timeline - Willebrod Snell, Dutch Mathematician; Discovered the Law of the Refraction of Light
b. ? 1591 and d. October 31, 1626
Dutch mathematician. He discovered the law of the refraction of light, that the sines of the angles of incidence and refraction have to each other a constant ratio. He published “Cyclometricus” (1621) a treatise on the measurement of a circle.
In these days, unhappily, the news of battle is
familiar to us, but every shock and every charge is
an application or misapplication of the mechanical
force of the sun. He blows the trumpet, he urges
the projectile, he bursts the bomb. And remember,
this is not poetry, but rigid mechanical truth. He
rears, as I have said, the whole vegetable world,
and through it the animal; the lilies of the field are
his workmanship, the verdure of the meadows and
the cattle upon a thousand hills.
—The Sun: John Tyndall
600 B. C.—Jupiter was known as a planet and inserted in a chart of the heavens, in which 1,460 stars are accurately described.
1201—Astronomy was studied by the Moors and by them brought to Europe.
1577—Leeuwenhoek proposed the undulatory theory of light and the law of double refraction.
1590—The microscope was invented by Zacharias Janssen or Zanse at Middleburg (1621), or by Drebbel.
1624—Willebrod Snell discovered the law of refraction.
1861—The spectrum analysis was applied to astronomy.
