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Galileo
Zaccharias Janssen and his son Hans were experimenting with multiple lenses in tubes, and discovered that these combinations could produce significant magnification of nearby objects. This discovery appears to have been the foundational research that produced both the telescope and the microscope. When Galileo heard of this and worked out the principles that allowed him to build a telescope with a focusing system. -
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek
Anton van Leeuwenhoek became fascinated with small things and magnification. Leeuwenhoek was an extremely unlikely scientist, holding no university degree or advanced education and being born of tradesmen. Fortunately for the future, he was diligent, careful, skillful and curious. This led him to begin to grind and polish extremely precise, tiny lenses with great curvature. These lenses eventually produced a magnification of 270 diameters, an accomplishment unmatched at the time. -
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anton van Leeuwenhoek
He went on to discover bacteria, blood cells, sperm cells, nematodes, and many other tiny objects. His research was directly responsible for bringing the microscopic to the attention of the scientific community of the time, through more than a hundred carefully written letters to the French Academy and the Royal Society of England. He is believed to have made over 500 microscopes, but fewer than ten remain today -
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Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke is one of the most neglected natural philosophers of all time. The inventor of, amongst other things, the iris diaphragm in cameras, the universal joint used in motor vehicles, the balance wheel in a watch, the originator of the word 'cell' in biology, he was Surveyor of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666, architect, experimenter, worked in astronomy - yet is known mostly for Hooke's Law. He fell out with Newton, and certainly had a difficult temperament. -
Robert hooke invented the first microscpe
This is when the first Microscope was invented by Robert Hooke. It was not unlike simple school microscopes that we use today.
and relied on sunlight to illuminate the image. -
‘looking like a honeycomb with agreat many little boxes’.
Hooke made a fortuitous observation while looking at a thin slice of cork. He saw something that he described as ‘looking like a honeycomb with a great many little boxes’.This was the first time that anyone realised that living things are not necessarily made of continuous material. People thought that the skin was made of a uniform substance and had no idea that it was made of much smaller constituent parts. The discovery caused great excitement in the scientific
community. -
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Matthias Jakob Schleiden
Matthias Jakob Schleiden was a German botanist. He was professor at the universities of Jena (1839-63) and Dorpat (1863-64). With Theodor Schwann, he is credited with establishing the foundations of the cell theory. Schleiden's paper Beiträge zur Phytogenesis (1838), although mistaken in some aspects, recognized the significance of the nucleus in the propagation of cells. -
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Theodore Schwann
He discovered the digestive enzyme pepsin in 1836. He showed that yeast were tiny plant-like organisms, and suggested that fermentation was a biological process. Schwann was a master microscopist who examined animal tissue, specifically working on notochord development in tadpoles. In "Mikroskopische Untersuchungen über die Übereinstimmung in der Struktur und dem Wachstum der Thiere und Pflanzen" ("Microscopic researches on the Conformity in Structure and Growth Between Animals and Plants," 183 -
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Rudolf Virchow
German pathologist and statesman, one of the most prominent physicians of the 19th century. He pioneered the modern concept of pathological processes by his application of the cell theory to explain the effects of disease in the organs and tissues of the body. He emphasized that diseases arose, not in organs or tissues in general, but primarily in their individual cells. -
Joseph Jackson Lister
showed that multiple lenses with much less curvature could be assembled in such a way as to reduce spherical and chromatic aberration, and development of the compound microscope began in earnest. -
Matthias Schleiden
German botanist named Matthias Schleiden suggested that all plant tissues are made of cells. -
cells where the building blocks of life
Two germans realised that all living things where made of cells there theory was that cells where the building blocks of life. -
Theodore Schwann
zoologist Theodore Schwann made a similar proposal as Matthias Schleiden for animals. -
Ernest Abbe and friedrich Zeiss
Ernst Abbe developed a mathematical formula that allowed the calculation of the maximum possible magnification that an optical microscope could produce. He called it the Abbe Sine Condition. The microscopes that Abbe and Zeiss produced based on Abbe’s calculations were the first ever built on a sound mathematical understanding of the optics of microscopy lenses. When Abbe and Zeiss partnered with Otto Schott and developed new methods of eliminating optical flaws from the apochromat was born. -
Rudolf Virchow
In 1858, Rudolf Virchow suggested that all cells come from preexisting cells. The ideas of these three scientists led to the creation of what is now called the cell theory -
Compound optical microscope
Often referred to as the "light microscope", is a type of microscope which uses visible light and a system of lenses to magnify images of small samples. Optical microscopes are the oldest and simplest of the microscopes -
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Ernst Ruska
Born in Heidelberg, Germany, Ruska was educated at the Munich Technical University and at Berlin University, where he obtained his PhD in 1934. He worked in industry until 1955 when he became professor of electron microscopy at the Haber Institute, Berlin, a post he held until his retirement in 1972. It had long been known that optical microscopes are limited by the wavelength of light to a magnifying power of about 2000. In 1928 Ruska attempted to focus an electron beam with an electromagnetic -
Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll
German engineers Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll constructed the prototype electron microscope, capable of four-hundred-power magnification
