The Indian Patent Office has granted patent to an invention by Raghunath Manohar of Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT), a constituent of Manipal University.
A statement issued by the university here said that Mr. Manohar’s invention, “A Multi lens System which is a microscope and a component of a telescope”, was approved recently.
He had applied for it in 2009, and is the only inventor of the device. Earlier, he had received a U.S. patent for “Marking Gauge”, of which too, he was a sole inventor.
Giving details about the invention, Mr. Manohar, Deputy Engineer (Laboratory), Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing, MIT, said that the telescope has 9 lens, which form the erecting lens system using 9 biconvex lenses of same focal length and diameter 10 cm and 50 mm, respectively. The optical system in the apparatus has eight PVC tubes of the required size. This is called the distance tube pieces.
The above are slid into a slightly larger PVC container pipe having a collar at one end with a hole at the centre to view the image.
The housing tube has external screw threads cut on it to help focus and see distant objects clearly. The container tube is the erecting eyepiece-cum-compound microscope.
To use this as a telescope, another bigger tube was used as an objective lens with larger diameter and focal length of 110 mm and 210 cm. This objective tube is fixed to the container tube housing the 9 lens erecting lens system. Thus, it functions as a telescope.
Mr. Manohar said that this invention of his has certain advantages over existing microscopes and telescopes. It has a wider field of view about three times of the existing ones; it can be used as a compound microscope of 80 X while some existing ones in addition to giving inverted image give 10 X magnification only when used as a simple microscope.
This can be made using locally available lenses and PVC pipes. Colour free image is obtained due to achromatism of the equivalent lenses which is the characteristic of the optical system, he said.
