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Galileo was quite aware of lenses as they were used for eyeglasses. When he heard that two lenses could form a magnified image he very quickly worked out what was going on with off the shelf eyeglass (glasses) lenses. He used a positive lens as the objective and a negative lens as the eyepiece.
Finding that these off the shelf lenses were of poor quality he set about grinding his own. Fortunately there were glassmakers in Venice that could supply him with very clear quality glass blanks. These were made from the flattened sides of blown bottles. Very quickly he was making far better 'telescopes' than even the so called originals. He had a sound understanding of the Physics of refraction and was a very good experimentalist. He never claimed to have invented the 'telescope'.
Building on the work of others and going far futher due to talent and hard work is not plagiarism.
It is called Science!
Bert
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