Leonard Digges (scientist)

[9] In 1542 Digges, in company with three other gentlemen, visited the castle of Guînes, 'where they impressed their host through debate and demonstration of their skills in geometry, navigation, measurement, and artillery'.

His life was pardoned on 1 April 1554, but according to Johnston 'his lands and goods, which had been seized after his attainder, continued to be held subject to payment of recognizances to the crown'.

On the fifth page of the preface, Thomas Digges provides a remarkable account of his father's accomplishments: [H]is divine mind aided with this science of Geometrical mensurations, found out the quantities, distances, courses, and strange intricate miraculous motions of these resplendent heavenly Globes of Sun, Moon, Planets and Stares fixed, leaving the rules and precepts thereof to his posterity.

Archimedes also (as some suppose) with a glass framed by revolution of a section Parabolicall, fired the Roman navy in the sea coming to the siege of Syracuse.

But to leave these celestial causes and things done of antiquity long ago, my father by his continual painful [painstaking] practices, assisted with demonstrations Mathematical, was able, and sundry times hath by proportional Glasses duly situate in convenient angles, not only discovered things far off, read letters, numbered pieces of money with the very coin and superscription thereof, cast by some of his friends of purpose upon downs in open fields, but also seven miles off declared what hath been done at that instant in private places.

[5] It is doubtful that Digges built a successful instrument, and the optical performance required to see the details of coins lying about in fields, or private activities seven miles away was far beyond the technology of the time.