In 1606 he was reappointed to the lectureship, and his salary a second
time increased, being raised to 520 florins. His public lectures were at
this period so much thronged that the ordinary place of meeting was
found insufficient to contain his auditors, and he was on several
occasions obliged to adjourn to the open air,—even from the school of
medicine, which was calculated to contain one thousand persons.
About this time he was considerably annoyed by a young Milanese, of the
name of Balthasar Capra, who pirated an instrument which Galileo had
invented some years before, and had called the geometrical and military
compass. The original offender was a German named Simon Mayer, whom we
shall meet with afterwards arrogating to himself the merit of one of
Galileo's astronomical discoveries; but on this occasion, as soon as he
found Galileo disposed to resent the injury done to him, he hastily
quitted Italy, leaving his friend Capra to bear alone the shame of the
exposure which followed. The instrument is of simple construction,
consisting merely of two straight rulers, connected by a joint; so that
they can be set to any required angle. This simple and useful
instrument, now called the Sector, is to be found in almost every case
of mathematical instruments. Instead of the trigonometrical and
logarithmic lines which are now generally engraved upon it, Galileo's
compass merely contained, on one side, three pairs of lines, divided in
simple, duplicate, and triplicate proportion, with a fourth pair on
which were registered the specific gravities of several of the most
common metals. These were used for multiplications, divisions, and the
extraction of roots; for finding the dimensions of equally heavy balls
of different materials, &c. On the other side were lines contrived for
assisting to describe any required polygon on a given line; for finding
polygons of one kind equal in area to those of another; and a multitude
of other similar operations useful to the practical engineer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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