Cipher Mysteries

Following on from my September 2008 article in History Today, I’ve just posted up an online Juan Roget bibliography listing the current set of primary, secondary, and tertiary references to Girolamo Sirtori’s claim to have met the “first inventor” of the telescope in Gerona.
While my article received a lot of positive attention from the Spanish [...] Read more »

At the beginning of this year, I became interested in the mystery surrounding the invention of the telescope, spurred by Richard SantaColoma’s outrageous claims that the enciphered Voynich Manuscript contained images of telescopes disguised as strange tiered albarelli. But really, who did invent the telescope? Where did it come from?
At first, I thought the answer [...] Read more »