For thousands of years men and women sought to discover the mysteries of the night sky, but the quantum leap from naked-eye observation to instrument added vision was one of the great technological advances of mankind. It began with the lens. It's origin is unknown, but spectacles were being worn in Italy as early as 1300. The inventor was probably making glass disks for leaded windows; he probably tested the clarity of a disk by looking through it and discovered that he could see better. The telescope was the first optical instrument and its origin is surrounded by controversy. The most likely story puts it in the shop of an obscure Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Lippershey, about 1600. Two children were playing with his lens, put two together, peered through them at a distant church tower and saw it wonderfully magnified. Lippershey looked for himself and soon mounted lenses together, creating his "looker." In 1608, Lippershey tried to sell it to the Dutch army, but his offer was eventually turned down because of claims from others that they had invented it. New of the invention spread rapidly. That same year the French ambassador at the Hague obtained one for King Henry IV, and in the next year, they were being sold in Paris and Germany under the name of "Dutch Trunks," "perspectives" and "cylinders." They soon appeared in Milan, and Venice and by end of the year, they were being made in London. Galileo The most influential person connected with the telescope in its early days was the Italian scientist Galileo. Within a month of Lippershey trying to sell his looker to the Dutch Army, word of the invention reached Venice when an unidentified stranger tried to sell one to the Senate, who referred the matter to its scientific adviser Paolo Sarpi, who examined it. But then the stranger and his instrument disappeared, so Sarpi went to see Galileo, the city's most respected instrument maker, who had just invented a new calculating device and described it. Galileo then "reinvented" it. The instrument was met with criticism and controversy as many felt that it did nothing other than create optical illusions and the image could not be trusted. In March of 1610, he published a description of his night sky observations as The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius),. Although it contained only twenty four pages, it astonished and troubled the learned world. He reported that the moon was not smooth, as previously believed, but rather rough and covered with craters; that the Milky Way was composed of millions of stars and Jupiter had four moons. The latter led him to challenge the long accepted geocentric view of the world system (the universe revolves around the Earth) and accept the heliocentric (the solar system revolves around the Sun) proposed some fifty years earlier by Copernicus. Galileo had proof! On the night of April 14, 1611, a banquet was held in his honor outside Rome. Galileo showed the guests his instrument and let them see his discovered. An unidentified Greek poet-theologian happened to be present and he proposed a name for the instrument, one borrowed from ancient Greece. It was quickly accepted and the host, Federico Cesi, then officially christened Galileo's instrument, "the telescope." These first optical instruments were what the average person identifies with the word "telescope," a long thin tube where light passes in a straight line from aperture (the front objective lens) to the eyepiece at the opposite end of the tube. These have come to be called refractive telescopes, because the objective lens bends, or refracts, light. They were used by all the great early astronomers - Galileo, Kepler, Huygens, and Hevelius. http://www.omni-optical.com/telescope/ut104.htm

"tele" is the is the greek word for "far off" and "scope" is greek for "see" put them together and you get telescope.

A telescope (from the Greek tele = 'far' and skopein = 'to look or see'; teleskopos = 'far-seeing') is an instrument designed for the observation of remote objects. The term usually refers to optical telescopes, but there are telescopes for most of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and for other signal types.