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The History of Microscope

The history of the microscope traces back to the 13th century with the use of simple magnifying glasses, evolving into the compound microscope invented by the Jansen family in 1590. Key figures such as Robert Hooke and Anton Van Leeuwenhoek made significant contributions to microscopy, with Hooke discovering cells and Leeuwenhoek observing microbes. Advances in optics throughout the 18th and 19th centuries led to improved lens designs and the development of specialized microscopes, culminating in the effective limits of optical microscopy by the late 19th century.

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4 views

The History of Microscope

The history of the microscope traces back to the 13th century with the use of simple magnifying glasses, evolving into the compound microscope invented by the Jansen family in 1590. Key figures such as Robert Hooke and Anton Van Leeuwenhoek made significant contributions to microscopy, with Hooke discovering cells and Leeuwenhoek observing microbes. Advances in optics throughout the 18th and 19th centuries led to improved lens designs and the development of specialized microscopes, culminating in the effective limits of optical microscopy by the late 19th century.

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dishamohanty006
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The History of Microscope

Subhashree:

Now let’s know the history of microscope. (Slide changes)

The earliest known use of simple microscopes that is magnifying glasses dates back to the
widespread use of lenses in eyeglasses in the 13th century. In 1538 Italian physician Girolamo
Fracastoro wrote in Homocentrica, “If anyone should look through two spectacle glasses, one
being superimposed on the other, he will see everything much larger.”

Three Dutch spectacle makers- Hans Jansen, his son Zacharias Jansen, and Hans Lippershey-
have received credit for inventing the compound microscope in 1590.

It was clearly of a compound microscope, with an eyepiece and an objective lens. The
magnification of these early scopes ranged from 3X to 9X, depending on the size of the
diaphragm openings. This kind of instrument, which came to be made of wood and cardboard,
often adorned with polished fish skin, became increasingly popular in the mid 17th century and
was used by the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke.

In 1609, Galileo, father of modern physics and astronomy, heard of these early experiments,
worked out the principles of lenses, and made a much better instrument with a focusing device.
(Slide changes)

Shreyasee:

Robert Hooke

In the year 1665, Robert Hooke observed the dead cork cells under his compound microscope
and discovered the cell. (Slide changes)

(Video starts) As he was looking at a piece of cork under his compound microscope, and the
little chambers he saw reminded him of cells or the rooms monks slept in their monasteries. So
he termed those little chambers as cells. (Video ends)

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek

Anton Van Leeuwenhoek is known as the father of microbiology. Leeuwenhoek had come upon
an infinity of tiny animals in pond which he called animalcules. They are known as microbes.
(Slide changes)

(Video starts) In earlier days, drapers used magnifying glasses to inspect the quality
of their fabrics. Anton van Leeuwenhoek was a draper in merchants who was
unhappy with those lenses, taught himself glass making. He created high quality
tiny glass spheres that could magnify objects up to two hundred and seventy times.
His microscopes were less than two inches long and were used by holding one side
close to the tiny lens and looking at the sample suspended on a pin. As a good
merchant he needs to keep his microscope secret but that wouldn’t be possible for
long. Leeuwenhoek was a curious man so he started analyzing anything he could
get his hands on. He sent his discoveries on mold licensees to the Royal Society in
London who were familiar with similar works. Leeuwenhoek had come upon an
infinity of tiny animals in pond which he called Animalcules. They are now known
as microbes. This was the first ever sighting of single celled organisms. (Video ends)

Shreya:

(Slide changes)Simple microscopes using single lenses can generate fine images; however, they
can also produce spurious colours due to chromatic aberration, in which different wavelengths of
light do not come to the same focus. The aberrations were worse in the compound microscopes
of the time, because the lenses magnified the aberrations at least as much as they magnified the
images. Although the compound microscopes were beautiful objects that conferred status on
their owners, they produced inferior images. (Slide changes)In 1733 the amateur English optician
Chester Moor Hall found by trial and error that a combination of a convex crown-glass lens and
a concave flint-glass lens could help to correct chromatic aberration in a telescope, and in 1774
Benjamin Martin of London produced a pioneering set of colour-corrected lenses for a
microscope. (Slide changes)

The appearance of new varieties of optical glasses encouraged continued development of the
microscope in the 19th century, and considerable improvements were made in understanding the
geometric optics of image formation. (Slide changes) The concept of an achromatic (non-colour-
distorting) microscope objective was finally introduced in 1791 by Dutch optician Francois
Beeldsnijder, and the English scientist Joseph Jackson Lister in 1830 published a work
describing a theoretical approach to the complete design of microscope objectives. (Slide
changes)The physics of lens construction was examined by German physicist Ernst Abbe. In
1868 he invented an apochromatic system of lenses, which had even better colour correction than
achromatic lenses, and in 1873 he published a comprehensive analysis of lens theory. Light
microscopes that were produced in the closing quarter of the 19th century reached the effective
limits of optical microscopy. Subsequent instruments, such as phase-contrast microscopes,
interference microscopes, and confocal microscopes, solved specific problems that had arisen
during the study of specimens such as living cells. (Slide changes)

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