-
Jan 1, 1300
14th century Grinding of lens invented
14th century – The art of grinding lenses is developed in Italy and spectacles are made to improve eyesight. -
Hans and Zacharias Janssen
1590 – Dutch lens grinders Hans and Zacharias Janssen make the first microscope by placing two lenses in a tube. -
Discovering the cell
Robert Hooke, discovered a honeycomb-like structure in a cork slice using a old compound microscope. He only saw cell walls as this was dead tissue. He created the term "cell" for the things he saw. -
Robert Hooke
1667 – Robert Hooke studies various object with his microscope and publishes his results in Micrographia. Among his work were a description of cork and its ability to float in water. -
First Living cells seen
Anton van Leeuwenhoek, looks at pond water with a microscope he made lenses for. -
Anton van Leeuwenhoek
1675 – Anton van Leeuwenhoek uses a simple microscope with only one lens to look at blood, insects and many other objects. He was first to describe cells and bacteria -
Bacteria
Anton van Leeuwenhoek made several more discoveries using a microscope, eventually publishing a letter to the Royal Society in which he included detailed drawings of what he saw. Among these was the first bacteria discovered. -
18th Century Microscope
18th century – Several technical innovations make microscopes better and easier to handle, which leads to microscopy becoming more and more popular among scientists -
Joseph Jackson Lister
Joseph Jackson Lister starts to make the image under the microscope more clear, by showing that several weak lenses used together at certain distances gave good magnification without blurring the image -
Inside the cell
Robert Brown, discovered the nucleus in plant cells. -
Expanding
Matthias Jakob Schleiden, proposes that all plant tissues are composed of cells, and that cells are the basic building blocks of all plants -
Cell Theory
Theodor Schwann, reached the conclusion that not only plants, but animal tissue as well is composed of cells. This ended debates that plants and animals were different in structure. He also pulled together one theory, which states: 1 - Cells are organisms and all organisms consist of one or more cells 2 - The cell is the basic unit of structure for all organisms -
Life
Albrecht von Roelliker discoveres that sperm and eggs are also cells. -
The basic unit of life
Carl Heinrich Braun reworks the cell theory, calling cells the basic unit of life. -
The third part
Rudolf Virchow, a German added the 3rd part to the cell theory. He states all cells develop only from existing cells. Virchow was also the first to propose that diseased cells come from healthy cells. -
Ernest Abbe
Abbe makes a mathimatical calculation to take advantage of light when using the microscope -
Richard Zsigmondy
develops the ultramicroscope and is able to study objects with great magnification (Noble prize winner in chemistry) -
Frits Zernike
Frits Zernike invents the phase-contrast microscope that allows the study of colorless and transparent biological materials. -
Ernst Ruska
1938 – Ernst Ruska develops the electron microscope. The ability to use electrons in microscopy greatly improves the resolution and greatly expands the borders of exploration.
(The Nobel Prize in Physics 1986) -
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invent the scanning tunneling microscope that gives three-dimensional images of objects down to the atomic level. -
Today
Today we have the stereo microscope and the compound light microscope, two of the most popular ones. There are many more microscopes but over these years these are the main ones that helped make the microscopes today.
