THE ASTRAL TUBE, which others call the telescope, was invented not, as is commonly claimed, in 1608, but in 1599, according to the astronomer, by which Leibniz notes he presumably meant 1604, nor was it invented by a Dutch spectacle-maker, nor by a Florentine mathematician, nor again by a Neapolitan magus, to which figures history conspires to give credit because it does not want to admit that the person who first extended one of man’s senses was merely the self-taught son of a Prague sculptor. The astronomer had penetrated the secrets of nature on his own, outside of any institution, e.g., the spectacle-maker guilds, the mathematical faculties, the esoteric circles of magi, and for that reason history had always been suspicious of him and had always conspired against him. “Yet this tube is no more Galileo’s tube than that star is Kepler’s star, and this I shall prove to you, Herr Leibniz,” he said. “You asked how I lost my eyes, and you asked how I can see without my eyes, but you failed to ask, How did you discover your tube? If wisdom consists, as the saying goes, in asking the right questions, it would have been wiser to ask not only the two eye questions but also the one tube question. Yet you shall know the answer to all three before the eclipse plunges us into darkness.

“And at the moment we are plunged into darkness, you shall see that these three questions are really one question,” he added, peering into the telescope, picking up his quill, and writing something down—a long string of numbers, or so it seemed to Leibniz in the faint flickering candlelight.

“You because you’re still young probably believe that the things you invent and the things you discover will be named after you, whereas the things invented by others and the things discovered by others will be named after others. It is not so. For example, I had nothing whatsoever to do with a certain mechanism for the very rapid and ostensibly painless plucking of feathers from a duck. And yet it is named after me. There is a contraption for hoisting the curtains of a theater with the press of a pedal not the crank of a winch—I’ve never touched it! But of course they attribute that curtain contraption to me. I did not discover the rodent that bears my name. There is in the Americas a fungus … in short, I have never laid eyes on that fungus. And so on. Yet the telescope, which is mine, they give to others.”