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100
Romans
They experimented with different shapes of clear glass and one of their samples was 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. These early lenses were called magnifiers or burning glasses. The word lens is actually derived from the Latin word lentil, as they were named because they resembled the shape of a lentil bean. -
Period: 100 to
Microscopes
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Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans
First compount microscope 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! Their first microscopes were more of a novelty than a scientific tool since maximum magnification was only around 9X and the images were somewhat blurry. -
Period: to
Janssen Twins lesn microscope
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Combining lenses
it was discovered that optical instruments could be made by combining lenses. -
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 made his own simple microscopes, which had a single lens and were hand-held. Van Leeuwenhoek achieved greater success than his contemporaries by developing ways to make superior lenses, grinding and polishing a small glass ball into a lens with a magnification of 270x, the finest known at that time. -
Hooke
Robert Hooke was a 17th century "natural philosopher" -- an early scientist -- noted for a variety of observations of the natural world. But perhaps his most notable discovery came in 1665, when he looked at a sliver of cork through a microscope lens and discovered cells. -
Joseph Jackson Lister
is famous for perfecting the lens of the microscope. He reduced spherical aberration by showing that several weak lenses used together at certain distances gave good magnification without blurring the image. His design was the prototype for the compound microscope. -
Ernst Abbe
Ernst was a German physicist, optical scientist and entrepreneur.
Ernst Abbe formulated what is known as the "diffraction limit" for microscopy. The limit states that it is impossible to resolve two elements of a structure which are closer to each other than about half the wave length in the lateral (x,y) plane and even further apart in the longitudinal plane(z). -
Richard Zsigmondy
He discovered how to prepare reproducibly gold hydrosols and also developed the slit-ultramicroscope in joint collaboration with Siedentopf. He won a Nobel Prize in 1925 -
Ernst Ruska
In 1933 he was able to put into use an electron microscope, built by himself, that for the first time gave better definition than a light microscope. He investigated the properties of electron lenses with short focal lengths. -
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer
They both are the inventors of the scanning tunneling microscop, invented in 1981, which provided the first images of individual atoms on the surfaces of materials.
