Question: What year brought the first recorded use of a telescope?
About the article "Telescope", section "History".

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This is a 0.61m fork mounted reflecting telescope operating at f/16.
This telescope is used exclusively for CCD photometry.
It is currently being upgraded and commissioned for robotic use as part of the AAVSO's Robotic Telescope Network.
This is the AAVSO's first Southern Hemisphere telescope. 
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"). 
The telescope was located on the grounds of Observatory House, Herschel's house in Slough, between 1789 and 1840.
The first observation with the telescope was on 19 February 1787, when Herschel pointed the then-incomplete telescope towards the Orion nebula, which he observed by crawling into the telescope and using a hand-held eyepiece:The one achievement of the telescope was to discover Enceladus and Mimas, the 6th and 7th moons of Saturn, although this is not certain, as Herschel used other telescopes at the same time.
Herschel described the view of Sirius through the telescope:As part of the funding deal with the telescope, Caroline Herschel was granted a pension of £50 per year to be William's assistant.
As a result, she was the first woman in England to be paid to carry out astronomy.
The telescope was a local tourist attraction, visited by rich and famous people on their way to the nearby Windsor Castle to visit the King, and was featured on Ordnance Survey maps.
It was the largest telescope in the world for 50 years.
It was called the "40-foot telescope" as at the time telescopes were referred to by the length of their tube rather than the diameter of the mirror.
Due to problems with the mirrors and because the telescope was unwieldy, the telescope did not prove to be a substantial improvement over smaller telescopes.
The weather was rarely suitable for the telescope, and most objects observed by Herschel were also visible in his smaller telescopes.
The final observation made by the telescope was in 1815.
The telescope was featured in Herschel's coat of arms: 
Once the 60 inch telescope project was well underway, Hale immediately set about creating a larger telescope.
John D. Hooker provided crucial funding for it, along with Carnegie.
The Saint-Gobain factory was again chosen to cast a blank in 1906, which it completed in 1908, After considerable trouble over the blank (and potential replacements), the telescope was completed and saw "first light" on November 2, 1917.
The blank started with over two tons of fused glass which was melted in a furnace into one piece.
The blank once melted into one piece took over a year to cool without cracking.
As with the 60 inch telescope, the entire telescope is suspended on a mercury bearing, to allow it to turn smoothly.
In 1919 the Hooker telescope was equipped with a special attachment, an optical astronomical interferometer developed by Albert Michelson, much larger than the one he had used to measure Jupiter's satellites.
Michelson was able to use the equipment to determine the precise diameter of stars, such as Betelgeuse, the first time the size of a star had ever been measured.
Henry Norris Russell developed his star classification system based on observations using the Hooker.
In 1935 the silver coating used since 1917 on the Hooker 100 inch mirror was replaced with a more modern and longer lasting aluminum metallic coating that reflected 50% more light than the older silver method of coating.
The newer method of coating for the telescope mirrors was first tested on the older 60 inch mirror telescope.
Edwin Hubble performed his critical calculations from work on the telescope.
He determined that some nebulae were actually galaxies outside our own Milky Way.
Hubble, assisted by Milton L. Humason, discovered the presence of the redshift that indicated the universe is expanding.
The Hooker's reign of three decades as the largest telescope came to an end when the Caltech-Carnegie consortium completed its telescope in 1948 at Palomar Observatory, south, in San Diego County, California.
By the 1980s, the focus of astronomy research had turned to deep space observation, which required darker skies than what could be found in the Los Angeles area, due to the ever-increasing problem of light pollution.
In 1986, the Carnegie Institution, which ran the observatory, handed it over to the non-profit Mount Wilson Institute.
At that time, the telescope was deactivated, but it was restarted in 1992 and outfitted with adaptive optics.
The Hooker telescope remains one of the pre-eminent scientific instruments of the 20th century.
The telescope has a resolving power of 0.05 arcsecond. 
  1600 - Prague observatory in Benátky nad Jizerou by Tycho Brahe  1603 - Johann Bayer's "Uranometria" is published  1608 - Hans Lippershey tries to patent an optical refracting telescope, the first recorded functional telescope  1609 - Galileo Galilei builds his first optical refracting telescope  1616 - Niccolò Zucchi experiments with a reflecting telescope  1633 - Construction of Leiden University Observatory  1641 - William Gascoigne invents telescope cross hairs  1641 - Danzig/Gdansk observatory of Jan Hevelius  1642 - Copenhagen University Royal observatory  1661 - James Gregory proposes an optical reflecting telescope with parabolic mirrors  1667 - Paris Observatory  1668 - Isaac Newton constructs the first "practical" reflecting telescope, the Newtonian telescope  1672 - Laurent Cassegrain designs the Cassegrain telescope  1675 - Royal Greenwich Observatory of England  1684 - Christiaan Huygens publishes "Astroscopia Compendiaria" in which he described the design of very long aerial telescopes