Dutch spectacle makers Zaccharias Janssen and Hans Lipperhey are noted as the first men to develop the concept of the compound microscope. By placing different types and sizes of lenses in opposite ends of tubes, they discovered that small objects were enlarged.
The glass lenses that he created could enlarge an object many times. The quality of his lenses allowed him, for the first in history, to see the many microscopic animals, bacteria and intricate detail of common objects. Leeuwenhoek is considered the founder of the study of microscopy and an played a vital role in the development of cell theory.
The microscope was in use for over years before the next major improvement was developed. Using early microscopes was difficult. Light refracted when passing through the lenses and altered what the image looked like. When the achromatic lens was developed for use in eyeglasses by Chester Moore Hall in , the quality of microscopes improved.
Using these special lenses, many people would continue to improve the visual acuity of the microscope. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many changes occurred in both the housing design and the quality of microscopes. Microscopes became more stable and smaller. It fell to a Dutch scientist, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, to make further improvements. Van Leeuwenhoek is sometimes popularly credited with the microscope's invention. He wasn't the inventor, but he was a great admirer of the Micrographia , and his instruments were the best of his era in terms of magnification: he achieved magnifying power up to times larger than the actual size of the sample, using a single lens.
He used his microscopes to describe bacteria harvested from tooth scrapings, and to study protozoans found in pond water.
By the dawn of the 18th century, British instrument designers had introduced improved versions of the tripod microscope invented by Edmund Culpeper. Other improvements included advanced focus mechanisms, although lens design remained rough and most instruments continued to be plagued by blurred images and optical aberrations.
In the first half of the 19th century, dramatic improvements in optics were made, thanks to advanced glass formulations and the development of achromatic objective lenses. The latter had significantly reduced spherical aberration in the lens, making it free of color distortions. The 20th century brought the introduction of instruments enabling the image to remain in focus when the microscopist changed magnification.
Thanks to vastly improved resolution, contrast-enhancing techniques, fluorescent labeling, digital imaging, and countless other innovations, microscopy has revolutionized such diverse fields as chemistry, physics, materials science, microelectronics, and biology. Zaccharias Janssen, the inventor of the microscope would marvel at the quality of even the most basic microscopes found in schools today.
View our fun info-graphic on the History of the Microscope here! Microscope History - Who Invented the Microscope? Sometime about the year , 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 which is a microscope that uses two or more lenses. View wishlist Shopping Cart: 0 Items. If they did build such a car, no reference to it has ever been found. Similarly, there is no further known reference to such a compound microscope device until we come back to the Greeks again. No less a person than Aristotle describes the workings of a microscope in some detail. The Greeks certainly made good use of curved lenses, which are an essential component of any stereo or compound microscope.
Ancient Greek boys probably shared every American boy's sense of triumph of using a curved lens, or magnifying glass, to start a fire. The Greeks, however, also used it for surgical procedures, not on ants as little boys are wont to do, but on people - to cauterize wounds and lesions caused by leprosy and so forth. Ancient Egyptians and Romans also used various curved lenses although no reference to a compound microscope has been found.
However, while Ancient Chinese, Greeks and Romans all applied their infinite wisdom to the issue, there is no known reference to either the use of artificial light or to multiple lenses.
In other words, we can give great credit to the Ancients for their foresight and achievements, but we have to look elsewhere to uncover both the first light and compound microscope. Incredibly, the next historical references with anything at all to do with microscopes, or more accurately, optics is 1, years after Rome was sacked and, even then, the references are only to the use of lenses in the invention of spectacles.
Put another way round, some of the smartest people the planet has ever produced, played and worked with single lenses for several thousand years without taking it further. Then, within just a few short years in Tuscany, Italy, two men claimed to have independently invented spectacles.
The evidence? Their tombstones! One, Salvano d'Aramento degli Amati died in in Florence and claimed to have kept the process secret. The other, Allessandro della Spina died in and claimed to have revealed his process. Pisa and Florence are but a short gallop away. You decide. In any event, a local monk, Girodina da Rivalta gave a sermon in in which he enthusiastically endorsed spectacles as a terrific invention and in passing, indicated that they had been in use for about 20 years.
Finally, in , another local from the Popozo family bemoaned that "I am so debilitated by age that without the glasses known as spectacles, I would no longer be able to read or write. At about the same time, it appears that lenses were being used in early telescopes. In the 13th century, the Englishman, Roger Bacon discusses them at length. Both spectacles and microscopes are relevant to microscopes because they trace the increasingly sophisticated use of lenses - the essential optical component of any microscope.
Then, a mere years later, we find a plethora of references and hard evidence of both telescopes and microscopes. The Renaissance had arrived and with it, an abundant flowering in the arts and sciences.
Most importantly, with the invention of the printing oress, ideas and developments could be spread easily and rapidly.
As a result, Thomas Digges' work on the telescope in England in the midth century and Hans Lippershey's work which included applying for a telescope patent were transmitted to others, including no less a genius than Galileo. Galileo immediately began to work with lenses. In a short timeframe, he developed an improved telescope with a focusing device and went on to conquer the stars. That said, we should also pay tribute to Sir Isaac Newton who around the same time in the UK, invented the reflecting telescope.
But what of microscopes? Well, the same Hans Lippershey and his son, Zaccharias Hanssen was experimenting with a variety of lenses.
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