Question: Which country were the first known practical telescopes invented?
About the article "Telescope", section "Abstract".

Candidate passages:
A telescope is an instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light).
The first known practical telescopes were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 17th century, using glass lenses.
They found use in terrestrial applications and astronomy.
Within a few decades, the reflecting telescope was invented, which used mirrors.
In the 20th century many new types of telescopes were invented, including radio telescopes in the 1930s and infrared telescopes in the 1960s.
The word "telescope" now refers to a wide range of instruments detecting different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and in some cases other types of detectors.
The word ""telescope"" (from the Greek τῆλε, "tele" "far" and σκοπεῖν, "skopein" "to look or see"; τηλεσκόπος, "teleskopos" "far-seeing") was coined in 1611 by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani for one of Galileo Galilei's instruments presented at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei.
In the "Starry Messenger", Galileo had used the term "perspicillum".
Based only on uncertain descriptions of the first practical telescope, invented by Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo, in the following year, made a telescope with about 3x magnification.
He later made improved versions with up to about 30x magnification.
With a Galilean telescope the observer could see magnified, upright images on the earth—it was what is commonly known as a terrestrial telescope or a spyglass.
He could also use it to observe the sky; for a time he was one of those who could construct telescopes good enough for that purpose.
On 25 August 1609, he demonstrated one of his early telescopes, with a magnification of about 8 or 9, to Venetian lawmakers.
His telescopes were also a profitable sideline for Galileo selling them to merchants who found them useful both at sea and as items of trade.
He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a brief treatise entitled "Sidereus Nuncius" ("Starry Messenger"). 
Single lenses have a variety of applications including photographic lenses, corrective lenses, and magnifying glasses while single mirrors are used in parabolic reflectors and rear-view mirrors.
Combining a number of mirrors, prisms, and lenses produces compound optical instruments which have practical uses.
For example, a periscope is simply two plane mirrors aligned to allow for viewing around obstructions.
The most famous compound optical instruments in science are the microscope and the telescope which were both invented by the Dutch in the late 16th century.
Microscopes were first developed with just two lenses: an objective lens and an eyepiece.
The objective lens is essentially a magnifying glass and was designed with a very small focal length while the eyepiece generally has a longer focal length.
This has the effect of producing magnified images of close objects.
Generally, an additional source of illumination is used since magnified images are dimmer due to the conservation of energy and the spreading of light rays over a larger surface area.
Modern microscopes, known as "compound microscopes" have many lenses in them (typically four) to optimize the functionality and enhance image stability.
A slightly different variety of microscope, the comparison microscope, looks at side-by-side images to produce a stereoscopic binocular view that appears three dimensional when used by humans.
The first telescopes, called "refracting telescopes" were also developed with a single objective and eyepiece lens.
In contrast to the microscope, the objective lens of the telescope was designed with a large focal length to avoid optical aberrations.
The objective focuses an image of a distant object at its focal point which is adjusted to be at the focal point of an eyepiece of a much smaller focal length.
The main goal of a telescope is not necessarily magnification, but rather collection of light which is determined by the physical size of the objective lens.
Thus, telescopes are normally indicated by the diameters of their objectives rather than by the magnification which can be changed by switching eyepieces.
Because the magnification of a telescope is equal to the focal length of the objective divided by the focal length of the eyepiece, smaller focal-length eyepieces cause greater magnification.
Since crafting large lenses is much more difficult than crafting large mirrors, most modern telescopes are "reflecting telescopes", that is, telescopes that use a primary mirror rather than an objective lens.
The same general optical considerations apply to reflecting telescopes that applied to refracting telescopes, namely, the larger the primary mirror, the more light collected, and the magnification is still equal to the focal length of the primary mirror divided by the focal length of the eyepiece.
Professional telescopes generally do not have eyepieces and instead place an instrument (often a charge-coupled device) at the focal point instead. 
One of the most difficult operations of practical optics was to polish the spherical surfaces of large object glasses accurately.
Fraunhofer invented a machine which rendered the surface more accurately than traditional grinding.
He also invented other grinding and polishing machines, and introduced many improvements into the manufacture of the different kinds of glass used for optical instruments, and which he found to be always injured by flaws and irregularities of various sorts.
In 1811 he constructed a new kind of furnace, and on the second occasion when he melted a large quantity found that he could produce flint glass, which, taken from the bottom of a vessel containing two hundredweight of glass, had the same refractive power as glass taken from the surface.
He found that the English crown glass and the German table glass both contained defects occasioning irregular refraction.
In the thicker and larger glasses, there would be more of such defects, so that in larger telescopes this kind of glass would not be fit for object glasses.
Fraunhofer therefore made his own crown glass.
The cause which had hitherto prevented the accurate determination of the power of a given medium to refract the rays of light and separate the different colors which they contain was chiefly the circumstance that the colors of the spectrum have no precise limits, and that the transition from one to another is gradual and not immediate; hence, the angle of refraction could not be accurately measured.
To obviate this, Fraunhofer made a series of experiments for the purpose of producing homogeneous light artificially, and unable to effect his object in a direct way, he did so by means of lamps and prisms.
Thus in 1814, Fraunhofer invented the spectroscope.
In the course of his experiments he discovered that bright fixed line which appears in the orange color of the spectrum when it is produced by the light of fire.
This line enabled him afterward to determine the absolute power of refraction in different substances.
Experiments to ascertain whether the solar spectrum contained the same bright line in the orange as that produced by the light of fire led him to the discovery of 574 dark fixed lines in the solar spectrum; millions of such fixed absorption lines are now known.
These dark fixed lines were later shown to be atomic absorption lines, as explained by Kirchhoff and Bunsen in 1859.
These lines are still called "Fraunhofer lines" in his honor; his discovery had gone far beyond the half-dozen apparent divisions in the solar spectrum that had previously been noted by Wollaston in 1802.
Fraunhofer also developed a diffraction grating in 1821, which occurred after James Gregory discovered the principles of diffraction grating and after American astronomer David Rittenhouse invented the first man-made diffraction grating in 1785.
Fraunhofer found out that the spectra of Sirius and other first-magnitude stars differed from the sun and from each other, thus founding stellar spectroscopy.
Ultimately, however, his primary passion was still practical optics, once noting that "In all my experiments I could, owing to lack of time, pay attention to only those matter which appeared to have a bearing upon practical optics".
In the early 1990s, a firm that designed and built refracting telescopes was named in his honor, Fraunhofer Systems Company, since the telescopes were based on his design but now the company is part of Burbank Optical Company. 
The practical exploitation of the instrument was certainly achieved and came to public attention in the Netherlands at about 1608, but the credit of the original invention has been claimed on behalf of three individuals: Hans Lippershey and Sacharias Jansen—spectacle-makers in Middelburg, and Jacob Metius of Alkmaar (also known as Jacob Adriaanszoon).
Hans Lippershey was credited with creating and disseminating designs for the first practical telescope—later applying to the States-General of the Netherlands on October 2, 1608, for a patent for an instrument ""for seeing things far away as if they were nearby"," (beating Jacob Metius's patent by a few weeks).
Lippershey failed to receive a patent since the same claim for invention had been made by other spectacle-makers.
Lippershey was handsomely rewarded by the Dutch government for copies of his design.
Sacharias Jansen's design for a telescope may have pre-dated Lippershey and Metius, but the invention was never widely publicized.
The original Dutch telescopes were composed of a convex and a concave lens—telescopes that are constructed this way do not invert the image.
Lippershey's original design had only 3x magnification.
Telescopes seem to have been made in the Netherlands in considerable numbers soon after the date of their invention, and rapidly found their way all over Europe.
Galileo happened to be in Venice in June 1609 and there heard of the "Dutch perspective glass" by means of which distant objects appeared nearer and larger.
Galileo states that he solved the problem of the construction of a telescope the first night after his return to Padua from Venice and made his first telescope the next day by fitting a convex lens in one extremity of a leaden tube and a concave lens in the other one.
A few days afterwards, having succeeded in making a better telescope than the first, he took it to Venice where he communicated the details of his invention to the public and presented the instrument itself to the doge Leonardo Donato, who was sitting in full council.
The senate in return settled him for life in his lectureship at Padua and doubled his salary.
Galileo devoted his time to improving and perfecting the telescope and soon succeeded in producing telescopes of greatly increased power.
His first telescope magnified three diameters, but he soon made instruments which magnified eight diameters and finally, one that magnified thirty-three diameters.
With this last instrument, he discovered in 1610 the satellites of Jupiter and soon afterwards the spots on the sun, the phases of Venus, and the hills and valleys on the Moon.
In this last achievement he now appears to have been preceded by Thomas Harriot who made the first drawings of the moon with the aid of a telescope in July 1609.
Galileo demonstrated the revolution of the satellites of Jupiter around the planet and gave rough predictions of their configurations, proved the rotation of the Sun on its axis and established the general truth of the Copernican system as compared with that of Ptolemy.
Galileo's instrument was the first to be given the name "telescope".
The name was invented by the Greek poet/theologian Giovanni Demisiani at a banquet held on April 14, 1611 by Prince Federico Cesi to make Galileo Galilei a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
The word was created from the Greek "tele" = 'far' and "skopein" = 'to look or see'; "teleskopos" = 'far-seeing'.
These brilliant achievements, together with Galileo's immense improvement of the instrument, overshadowed to a great degree the credit due to the original inventor, and led to the universal adoption of the name of the Galilean telescope for the form of the instrument invented by Lippershey.