One of the reasons that telescopes were invented in the late 1500's was due to the Gutenberg Press. Books went from costing a year's salary to a month's, in some cases a weeks' pay; the wiki page says that 20 million books were in circulation by 1500. Now that more and more people were able to read, and afford the books to do so, the need for eyeglasses increased. The rise of the Dutch glass-works industry and the optical glass they made lead to the first spyglasses; rumors of the leaking of said information leading to death are exaggerated. It is not really a shock that a Dutchman filed the first patents for a telescopes. Note that although the patent was filed in 1608, spyglasses were in use on ships for at least a decade prior. My hope is that all the new reading and looking at screens will produce a similar jump in optical aids, and I can hopefully live long enough to get robotic eyes to replace the shitty under-performing units I was born with.