Colophon
The image on the cover of Security Monitoring is a man using a telescope. While the telescope is primarily used for the viewing of distant objects, a host of earlier, cruder telescopes were used simply for the purposes of magnification.
Euclid wrote about the reflection and refraction of light, and Aristophanes later showed that a globe filled with water could enlarge objects. Yet the invention of a proper telescope was delayed in part because its effects were thought to be so astonishing that the instrument and its creator were deemed evil. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon documented the effects of magnification and wrote about the use of lenses to study the sky: “The Sun, Moon, and Stars may be made to descend hither in appearance…which persons unacquainted with such things would refuse to believe.” Subsequent to his observations, Bacon was labeled a magician and imprisoned.
The use of the lens for magnification only became acceptable with the invention and general usage of eyeglasses. Then, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey of Holland reportedly noticed a church tower jump to the front doorway of his shop when he stared at the tower through two differently shaped lenses at once. Lippershey then succeeded in making the telescope known more widely, and it was he who piqued Galileo Galilei’s interest in the instrument sometimes dubbed the “far looker.”
Galileo and Lippershey each independently thought he could profit from the distribution of telescopes, and both men also foresaw the military advantages of the instrument. Galileo famously went a step further with his use of the telescope and sought out sun spots, moons of Jupiter, and new “lands” in the sky above. Although Galileo was eventually persecuted for saying that the sun was at the center of the solar system, his and Lippershey’s military application of smaller telescopes later became useful to strategists during the U.S. Civil War, when military personnel often used telescopes designed like the one on the cover of this book to spy on their enemies.
The cover image is from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont’s TheSansMonoCondensed.