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Optical sciences professor John Greivenkamp thought students were in danger of losing the connection to their field's beginnings.

It was time to start collecting old telescopes to connect them with the past.

He wanted to give students at the University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences a physical tie between those first optical tools to search the night skies and their age of lasers and fiber optics.

After all, the origins of optics were in telescopes, eyeglasses, microscopes and cameras.

Greivenkamp had the revelation while showing a student a 1960 Polaroid "instant" camera. Instead of being wowed by the technological breakthrough that the Polaroid's nearly instant images signified, the Digital Age student wondered why the old camera used flashbulbs instead of an electronic flash.

The Polaroid camera, after all, was a revolutionary development within Greivenkamp's lifetime. It wasn't that long ago.

The Polaroid produced pictures in about a minute, after the application of some foul-smelling chemical to the surface of the Polaroid film. But in the days of taking film to a drugstore or photo lab and waiting a week for the prints, that was showstopping technology.

The early models, like film cameras of the time, used flashbulbs — the hated, disposable glass orbs that produced a blast of light when there wasn't enough natural light for a proper exposure. They were cumbersome, relatively expensive and notoriously unreliable. "Did the flash go off?" was the thing amateur photographers said most often, right after, "Just one more."

But the answer to the student's question, that the electronic flash wasn't yet a consumer-level item, wasn't the real problem. Greivenkamp saw the question as a sign that students were losing a sense of how technologies fit together in their own field of study. He wanted to connect them with their academic and professional past.

"Not long after that I found a couple telescopes in antique stores," Greivenkamp said. "It was neat to hold a 200-year-old telescope in your hands. The collection's grown from that."

Soon, Greivenkamp was cruising eBay and getting to know antique telescope dealers around the world, using his discretionary fund for teaching online courses.

That was about five years ago. The timing was fortuitous, as this is roughly the 400th anniversary of the invention of the improved telescope design credited to Galileo Galilei.

Now, dozens of old telescopes, opera glasses, microscopes and cameras are on display in the lobby of the College of Optical Science's new copper and green glass building. There are also display cases on some of the building's upper floors.

The most numerous are collapsible telescopes, handmade in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s, the type most of us have only seen a movie pirate captain pull from his pocket, extend to its full length and put to his eye in search of loot. The sections — "draws" — fit inside one another to make them more compact.

Many of the early telescopes on display, indeed, were for naval use, said Greivenkamp.

But they were also for amateur astronomy, though they were likely very expensive and "toys of the wealthy," Greivenkamp said.

One thing that becomes apparent is the lack of standardization. Though many of the later telescopes were made of brass tubes, some of the earlier models' barrels were made of stiff paper or wood, some with hand-carved bone and horn rings to hold the lenses in place.

That's not to say they are crude. One of the most stunning is from a Venetian telescope maker in the early 1700s. It has green and ornately decorated red vellum (treated calfskin) draws.

A few even use fish scales as a covering for the paper tubes.

Later models were mostly of brass.

"I find the appearance and materials used are almost more interesting than the optics," admits Greivenkamp.

But some are technologically significant, including an early reflector — mirror — telescope. Most of the collection is made up of refractor telescopes using ground lenses. The technique for coating glass with a thin film of reflective aluminum to make optical grade mirrors came fairly late, Greivenkamp said.

The collection also includes a large view camera, of the type used by early photographers who coated glass plates with chemicals before the invention of film.

Some early microscopes are also on display, including a beautiful polished brass stereo vision model, but Greivenkamp said the cost of microscopes limited that part of the collection.

It's a permanent collection, expected to be on display indefinitely, Greivenkamp said.