Complete history of microscope invention

Dating back to the first century when glass was first invented, the Roman's were investigating the use of glass and how viewing objects through it, made the objects appear larger.

Then, in the 13th Salvino D'Armate from Italy, made the first eye glass, providing the wearer with an element of magnification to one eye.

The earliest simple forms of magnification were magnifying glasses, usually about 6x - 10x and were used for inspect ing tiny insects such as fleas, hence these early magnifiers called " flea glasses".

Then, during the 1590's, two Dutch spectacle makers, Zacharias Jansen 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. Although no Jansen microscopes survived, an instrument made for Dutch royalty was described as being composed of " 3 slid ing tubes, measuring 18 inches long when fully extend ed, and two inches in diameter ". The microscope was said to have a magnification of 3x when fully closed, and 9x when fully extended.

It is believed that Zacharias Jansen's father, Hans, helped him build the first microscope in 1595.

It was Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a Dutch scientist, and one of the pioneer s of microscopy who in the late 17th century became the first man to make and use a real microscope.

Van Leeuwenhoek achieved greater success than his contemporari es by developing ways to make superior lenses, grind ing and polish ing five hundred and fifty lenses to make his new lens tube that had a magnifying power of 270x and could view objects one millionth of a meter (other microscopes of the time were lucky to achieve 50x magnification).

Van Leeuwenhoek made many biological discoveries using his microscopes. He was the first to see and describe bacteria, yeast plants, the teeming life in a drop of water, and the circulation of blood corpuscles in capillar ies. During a long life he used his lenses to make pioneer studies on an extraordinary variety of things, both living and non living.

Van Leewenhoek's work was verif ied and further developed by English scientist Robert Hooke, who published the first work of microscopic studies, Micrographia, in 1665. Robert Hooke's detailed studies further ed study in the field of microbiology in England and advanced biological science as a whole.

With the advancement of technology and improved optics, the microscope as we know it today came into being. The theoretical minimum size able to be viewed by an optical microscope is 200nm, since optical microscopes are only able focus on objects that are at least the size of a wavelength of light. An electron microscope, in contrast, can magnify images thousands of times smaller than a wavelength of light.