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Zacharias Janssen
Experimented with multiple lenses placed in a tube. Janssen observed that viewed objects in front of the tube appeared greatly enlarged, creating both the forerunner of the compound microscope -
Rober Hooke
He looks through a microscope at a sliver of cork. He notices what he calls cells or pores. He believes the cells contained the noble juices or fibrous threads of the tree when it was alive. -
Anton Van Leeuwenhoek
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 he invented new methods for grinding and polishing microscope lenses that allowed for curvatures providing magnifications of up to 270 diameters, the best available lenses at that time. -
Matthias Schleden
Concluded that all plant tissues are composed of cells and that an embryonic plant arose from a single cell. He declared that the cell is the basic building block of all plant matter. -
Theodore Schwann
Reached the same conclusion as Schleiden about animal tissue being composed of cells, ending speculations that plants and animals were fundamentally different in structure. Schwann described cellular strucures in animal cartilage (rigid extracellular matrix). -
Rudolph Virchow
writes and publishes his aphorism omnis cellula e cellula, which means every cell stems from another cell. He theorizes that all forms of disease come from changes in normal cells.
