OVERVIEW

The industry is full of rules of thumb for the shop manufacture and test of optics. Included here are a select few that should be available to anyone involved in electro-optics.

Shop optics began many centuries ago, when the first optical hardware was made. To early investigators, the world was full of rules of thumb and principles explained by thought process alone. Certainly, shop optics developed earlier than 425 B.C., when the first known written account of making lenses was written ( The Clouds, by Aristophanes). Glass was discovered about 3500 B.C., and crude lenses dating from 2000 B.C. were found in Crete and Asia Minor. Euclid, in his 300 B.C. publication Optics, may have been the first to write about curved mirrors. The Romans polished gemstones, and, by the eleventh century, glassblowers were making lenses for spectacles and research.

Optical shop manufacture and test was flourishing shortly after A.D. 1600 with the invention of both the telescope and the microscope and the popularity of spectacles. Roger Bacon wrote of magnification and applied lenses to look at celestial objects. His reward, a gift from the religious fanatics of his time, was imprisonment. It was during the Renaissance that the likes of Galileo, Lippershey, and others applied optics to telescopes, microscopes, and other visual aids. An interesting note ^[1] (which the reference cautions may be "partly or wholly fiction") is that there is evidence that Lippershey applied for a patent for his telescope and sent one...