The History of Microscopes
When humans realized that certain things cannot be seen with the naked eye, a device had to be developed to do so. The modern microscope therefore marks humankind's progress against optical limitations.
Antecedents
Getting its name from a combination of the Greek words "mikros" ("small") and "skopein" ("to look" or "see"), a microscope is an instrument used for viewing objects that are too small for people to see with regular eyesight. Magnifying glass, spectacles and glass lenses can be considered predecessors to the microscope, as they sought to expand the possibilities of human eyesight.
Discovery
The first microscope was invented in 1590. Drawing from the innovations made so far, plus experience gained in their spectacle-making business, the father-and-son team of Hans and Zacharias Jansen (or just one of them, depending on which questionable historical account one believes) placed a lens on each end of a tube and discovered that objects were enlarged when they used the device--much more than through the glasses they produced. The tool got its name from doctor Giovanni Faber (1574-1629) in 1625 after observing his friend Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) use it for his scientific experiments. By then, several workshops had been set up throughout Europe to manufacture the new invention.
17th and 18th Centuries
By the 18th century, the microscope had been greatly improved on and used for several applications in its role as a scientific tool. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) used the microscope to discover the basic unit of life and coin the term "cell," one of the observations he published in his work "Micrographia" (1665). Microscope maker Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) is credited with developing lenses with shorter focal lengths to increase the level of magnification, an innovation that greatly assisted his discovery of bacteria, capillary systems and insect life cycles, thus earning him a reputation as possibly the first microbiologist. The title "Father of Microscopy" is usually shared between Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek for their groundbreaking work with the microscope.
19th Century
By the mid-19th century, the microscope had gone through a few more mechanical improvements, such as the creation of stages and slides for the examined sample to be placed in, and the development of objective lenses to control the sample's magnification and resolution. Key figures of microscopy at this time were surgeon Joseph Lister (1827-1912), who used several weak lenses together at certain distances to give acceptable magnification without sample blurring, and physicist Ernst Abbe (1840-1905), who introduced the importance of resolution in microscopy. Microscopes were now mass-produced mainly in Germany and the United States.
20th Century to the Present
In 1903, Richard Zsigmondy (1865-1729) developed the ultramicroscope, which enabled him to study objects below the wavelength of light. In 1932, Fritz Zernike (1888-1966) invented the phase-contrast microscope to study colorless and transparent biological materials. In 1938, Ernst Ruska (1906-1988) developed the electron microscope. And physicists Gerd Binnig (born in 1947) and Heinrich Rohrer (born in 1933) invented the scanning, tunneling microscope to view objects at the atomic level.
Today, the microscope--from the simplest to the most sophisticated designs--is one of the most indispensable tools in science.
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