Telescope and microscope

The telescope appears in the Netherlands in 1608. Galileo turns it on the sky in 1609 and publishes what he sees in 1610: moons around Jupiter, phases of Venus, a rough Moon. The microscope is the same trick pointed the other way. Compound microscopes are in use in the early 1600s. Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek later make them show cells and animalcules.

The contribution is a world past the naked eye. Astronomy stops being only angles you can see. Biology eventually gets the cell, the germ, and the chip you can only inspect with optics. Modern semiconductor factories are lithography, which is light and lenses aimed at silicon.

Galileo did not invent the lens. Spectacles are medieval. The new step is mounting lenses so they magnify a distant or tiny scene and then trusting the image enough to argue about nature.

1610 on the card is Galileo's Starry Messenger, not the first lens.