Up to this time, Great Britain had left foreign competitors far behind in the instrumental department of astronomy. The quadrants and circles of Bird, Cary and Ramsden were unapproached abroad. The reflecting telescope came into existence and reached maturity on British soil. The refracting telescope was cured of its inherent vices by British ingenuity. But with the opening of the nineteenth century, the almost unbroken monopoly of skill and contrivance which our countrymen had succeeded in establishing was invaded, and British workmen had to be content to exchange a position of supremacy for one of at least partial temporary inferiority.
Somewhat about the time that Herschel set about polishing his first speculum, Pierre Louis Guinand, a Swiss artisan, living near Chaux-de-Fonds, in the canton of Neuchâtel, began to grind spectacles for his own use, and was thence led on to the rude construction of telescopes by fixing lenses in pasteboard tubes. The sight of an England achromatic stirred a higher ambition, and he took the first opportunity of procuring some flint glass from England (then the only source of supply), with the design of imitating an instrument the full capabilities of which he was destined to be the humble means of developing. The English glass proving of inferior quality, he conceived the possibility, unaided and ignorant of the art as he was, of himself making better, and spent seven years (1784-90) in fruitless experiments directed to that end. Failure only stimulated him to enlarge their scale. He bought some land near Les Brenets, constructed upon it a furnace capable of melting two quintals of glass, and reducing himself and his family to the barest necessaries of life, he poured his earnings (he at this time made bells for repeaters) unstintingly into his crucibles.[314] His undaunted resolution triumphed. In 1799 he carried to Paris and there showed to Lalande several discs of flawless crystal four to six inches in diameter. Lalande advised him to keep his secret, but in 1805 he was induced to remove to Munich, where he became the instructor of the immortal Fraunhofer. His return to Les Brenets in 1814 was signalised by the discovery of an ingenious mode of removing striated portions of glass by breaking and re-soldering the product of each melting, and he eventually attained to the manufacture of perfect discs up to 18 inches in diameter. An object-glass for which he had furnished the material to Cauchoix, procured him, in 1823, a royal invitation to settle in Paris; but he was no longer equal to the change, and died at the scene of his labours, February 13 following.