Joseph von Fraunhofer was certainly the most talented lenscrafter of his time. Though he received very little in the way of formal schooling, he dedicated his life to creating optical instruments of unsurpassed quality. Through his efforts, telescopes and prisms of amazing clarity were created; in addition, he invented the device known as the spectroscope for observing the dark lines found in the visible spectrum, effectively founding the science of spectroscopy.

Fraunhofer was born in Bavaria in 1787. His father was a poor glass maker who could not afford to send his youngest to more than a few years of school, and so at the age of 10 Joseph began working in the family workshop. Upon his father's death in 1789 Fraunhofer became an apprentice to a Munich lensmaker. Although young Fraunhofer showed much promise, the master lensmaker used him primarily as slave labor, driving the boy to near-starvation and exhaustion...