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The first microscope was invented in the beginning of the 17th century. This is what was the beginning of exploring the microscopic world. -
The first description of the cell is attributed to Robert Hooke
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Hooke saw that they look like a small room. A small room is latin is cella. -
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek saw that the particles under the micro scope were living he then wrote a letter on 9 October, 1676 to the Royal Society that said that the particles were living organisms. -
Robert Brown was the first to recognize the nucleus as an essential constituent of living cells in 1831 -
In 1838, Matthias Jakob Schleiden suggested that every structural element of plants is composed of cells or their products -
There had been ideas that cells were the basic component of living organisms but the cell theory was officially made in 1838-1839
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In 1839 Theodor Schwann stated that "the elementary parts of all tissues are formed of cells" and that "there is one universal principle of development for the elementary parts of organisms... and this principle is in the formation of cells" -
In the 1850s Robert Remak, Rudolf Virchow, and Albert Kolliker showed that cells are formed through scission of pre-existing cells -
In 1891 Wilhelm Waldeyer introduced the term neurons to indicate independent nerve cells. Thereafter, cell theory as applied to the nervous system became known as the neuron theory.