On a clear night in July of 1609, English polymath Thomas Harriot pointed his “Dutch perspective glass” toward the crescent moon. The crude lunar map he sketched from his observations dates him as the earliest person known to have used a telescope to study a celestial object, beating Galileo Galilei by nearly four months. Over subsequent years Harriot produced remarkable drawings showing the locations of the moon’s craters and what he believed to be its oceans and coastlines. His cartography was not bettered for decades. So why does Galileo enjoy lasting fame while Harriot has been all but forgotten?
“The unfortunate thing is that Harriot never got around to publishing his maps,” says Stephen Pumfrey, a professor of history at Lancaster University in England, “and it was definitely a publish-or-perish situation.” Since Harriot never publicly claimed to have been the first to observe the moon’s surface in detail, Galileo got ...
