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the invention of microscope
1590, two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans started experimenting with these 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! They had just invented the compound microscope. -
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microscope timespan
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galileos telescope
Galileo heard of their experiments and started experimenting on his own. He described the principles of lenses and light rays and improved both the microscope and telescope. He added a focusing device to his microscope and of course went on to explore the heavens with his telescopes. -
polish king
1612 - Galileo presents occhiolino to Polish king Sigismund III. -
compond microscope
1619 - Cornelius Drebbel (1572 – 1633) presents, in London, a compound microscope with two convex lenses. -
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke published Micrographia in 1665. It is his most famous work and is notable for the stunning illustrations, drawn by Hooke himself. Microphagia presents several accounts of Hooke's observations through the use of the microscope. He looked at all sorts of things (snow, a needle, a razor, etc.) with a primitive compound microscope -
Van Leeuwenhoek
Van Leeuwenhoek achieved greater success than his contemporaries by developing ways to make superior lenses, grinding and polishing five hundred and fifty lenses to make his new lens tube that had a magnifying power of 270x and could view objects one millionth of a meter (other microscopes of the time were lucky to achieve 50x magnification). -
Ernst Abbe
1860s - Ernst Abbe discovers the Abbe sine condition, a breakthrough in microscope design, which until then was largely based on trial and error. The company of Carl Zeiss exploited this discovery and becomes the dominant microscope manufacturer of its era. -
Henry Clifton
1863 - Henry Clifton Sorby develops a metallurgical microscope to observe structure of meteorites. -
Érnst Ruska
1931 - Ernst Ruska starts to build the first electron microscope. It is a Transmission electron microscope (TEM) -
Erwin whlhelm Muller
1936 - Erwin Wilhelm Müller invents the field emission microscope. -
Erwin Wilhelm Müller
1951 - Erwin Wilhelm Müller invents the field ion microscope and is the first to see atoms. -
Erwin Wilhelm Müller
1967 - Erwin Wilhelm Müller adds time-of-flight spectroscopy to the field ion microscope, making the first atom probe and allowing the chemical identification of each individual atom. -
Kingo Itaya
1988 - Kingo Itaya invents the Electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope -
kelvin probe
1991 - Kelvin probe force microscope invented. -
today
The theoretical minimum size able to be viewed by an optical microscope is 200nm (as defined by Abbe), since optical microscopes are only able focus on objects that are at least the size of a wavelength of light (usually, a wavelength of around 550 nm is assumed).