Joe Amero, age 13, of Washington, Illinois, for his question:

Did Galileo invent the optic tube?

There is some confusion about who invented the optic tube, but most likely it was a Dutch spectacle maker. The first models were regarded as interesting novelties capable of doubling the view of church steeples and other local landmarks. The great Galileo saw astronomical possibilities in the little instrument and improved it to build the ancestor of the tele¬scope.

In the early 1600s, Hans Lippershay and Zacharias Jansen ground glass lenses and made spectacles in the Dutch town of Middleburg. We are not sure which of them invented the optic tube. However, the evidence favors Lippershay.

Most researchers suspect that its secrets were revealed when either Lippershay senior or his son chanced to hold up two lenses and align them for a view through the window of the workshop. By happy accident they were the right kinds of lenses and by happy accident they were held in just the right positions. Whoever took the first peek was astonished to behold a magnified close up of the town's church steeple.

Somebody fixed the two lenses in a viewing tube. The one in front was a convex lens, thick in the middle and tapering toward the rim. The other was a concave lens, caved in on both sides. i3o, doubt considerable trial and error was needed to figure the correct distance between the objective, or convex lens and the ocular, or concave eyepiece.

These first optic tubes merely enlarged the distant view by two. Meantime, in Italy, the great Galileo heard about them and figured how to make one for himself. His superior instrument magnified 32 times    and being one of history's master astronomers, naturally he trained it on the heavens. Galileo's super optic tube became the world's first telescope.

During the winter of 1609 and 1610, he used it tomake astronomical history and to establish a landmark that shattered man's former convictions that the earth was the center of the universe. From a rooftop in Venice, through his ornate little telescope, he became the first earthling to behold the rings of Saturn, the changing phases of Venus and four of Jupiter's moons. He also saw that the hazy blur of the Milky Way actually is crowded with swarms of millions of faraway stars.

Using a theory suggested by Copernicus, the great man assembled his new evidence to present the true structure of the Solar System    as a cen¬tral sun with orbiting planets. For 14 centuries, big headed scholars had cherished the self important notion that the entire universe revolved around their home planet. For this reason, Galileo was tortured and forced to retract his picture of the Solar System.

Newton, an Englishman, carried on the work of Galileo and went far beyond it. Among other things, he invented the reflecting telescope, which uses a metal cup to catch and magnify light rays with a mirror to reflect the image to an eyepiece.