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My first telescope, made in 1951, consisted of a nondiscript spectacle lens with a focal length of about 18" (45cm) carefully attached to one end of a 2" cardboard tube.
At the other end of the tube I built up a sliding tube from cardboard rolled around a lens focal length about 10mm extracted from the view finder of a damaged box brownie.
With this I managed to see the moons of Jupiter. I later added an intermediate lens (main lens from the box brownie) that erected the view so I could use the telescope for normal local viewing. I lost interest after a few days and had no interest in the sky or telescopes until 1990 when I bought a 11TR tasco from the Binocular and telescope shop in Hunter Arcade. With an extra 40mm eyepiece and AC drive I spent $950.
At the time I had a budget that would have got me an 8" Celestron SCT if Mike had worked on me!
Barry
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