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Ancient Rome
The Romans experimented with different shapes of glass some samples were thick in the middle and thin on the edges. They discovered that if you held one of these lenses over an object, the object would look larger. -
Jan 1, 1500
Progression of Microscope
After the invention of eyeglasses, the next progression of the microscope was in the 1500s when the first arrangement of two lenses was created to improve the magnification of an object. These were known as flea glasses and were used to examine creatures like the flea or other small objects. -
Zaccharias & Hans Janssen
Sometime, during the 1590's, two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans started experimenting with lenses. They put several lenses in a tube and made a very important discovery. The object near the end of the tube appeared to be greatly enlarged, much larger than any simple magnifying glass could achieve by itself.This microscope appeared to look more like a telescope however from this advancement a newer form of microscope was developed. -
Petrus Borellus
Petrus Borellus wrote the first publication on the use of microscope in medicine. He described 100 observations, including how to remove ingrowing eyelashes that are invisible to the naked eye. -
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke published micrographia containing notable illustrations drawn by Hooke himself. These illustrations were of various objects such as snow, needles, fleas, corks or razors under a microscope. Upon viewing the cork under the microscope he discovered tiny pores on the cork and later called them cells. Little did he know he had just discovered a plant cells. -
Anton van Leeuwenhoek
Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch draper and scientist, and one of the pioneers of microscopy who in the late 17th century became the first man to make and use a real microscope. He built a simple microscope with only one lens to examine blood, yeast, insects and many other tiny objects. Leeuwenhoek was the first person to describe bacteria, and observe animal and plant tissues and microorganisms. -
Technology Innovations
Technical innovations improved microscopes, leading to microscopy becoming popular among scientists. Lenses combining two types of glass reduced the "chromatic effect" the disturbing halos resulting from differences in refraction of light. -
Joseph Jackson Lister
Joseph Jackson Lister reduces spherical aberration or the "chromatic effect" by showing that several weak lenses used together at certain distances gave good magnification without blurring the image. This was the prototype for the compound microscope. -
Ernst Abbe
Ernst Abbe, then research director of the Zeiss Optical Works, wrote a mathematical formula called the "Abbe Sine Condition". His formula provided calculations that allowed for the maximum resolution in microscopes possible. -
Richard Zsigmondy
Richard Zsigmondy developed the ultramicroscope that could study objects below the wavelength of light. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1925. -
Ernst Ruska
Ernst Ruska co-invented the electron microscope for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. An electron microscope depends on electrons rather than light to view an object, electrons are speeded up in a vacuum until their wavelength is extremely short, only one hundred-thousandth that of white light. Electron microscopes make it possible to view objects as small as the diameter of an atom. -
Frits Zernike
Frits Zernike invented the phase-contrast microscope that allowed for the study of colorless and transparent biological materials for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953. -
Gerd Binnig & Heinrich Rohrer
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invented the scanning tunneling microscope that gives three-dimensional images of objects down to the atomic level. Binnig and Rohrer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. The powerful scanning tunneling microscope is the strongest microscope to date.
