A Brief History of the Microscope

From the beginning, man has suspected that there were worlds underground from his naked eye. If he could look very closely at a drop of pond water, he could barely perceive things captivating of their own accord. This captivating discovery led to the need to "see" closer.

Since ancient times there has been glass and the forming of glass objects. During the time of Pliny the Elder, around the First Century A.D., there were globes of glass or crystal that were shaped just right, enabling the "seer" to visualize things held under it at a magnified state. It was also captivating to ancient scientists that light from the sun was focused to a point, causing parchment to burn.

Led Microscope Light

All of this advanced into serious reasoning by early scientists. If they could operate the shape of the crystal or glass, they could operate the estimate of magnification. Thus the first microscopes were born. The history of the microscope follows a spectacular, timeline in just a short period, as we will witness in this article.

Understanding the physics of light came about in the third century B.C., when Euclid wrote the Optica. In this writing he describes the rules of reflected light, and is thought about one of the Father of Optics, yet so many pioneers came after him, utilizing his ideas and mathematics to excellent the methods of magnification.

In the early 1300's, Bernard of Gordon, a French Physicist, made the use of lenses, so named for their shape like lentel seeds, to definite optical aberrations in the human eye. This invention lead to the interest in production the human eye even better, such as seeing at the stars or peeking into the tiny world.

Galileo tinkered with lenses to generate the first telescope. The lenses were primitively ground glass, yet they revealed all of Jupiter's moons. Similarly, van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch dry goods clerk, made spherical glass lenses and mounted them in a small owner with a straightforward screw system, thus enabling focus control. With this early microscope he observed bacteria, yeasts, protozoa, and even human blood corpuscles.

After this discovery, straightforward "flea glasses", or tubes with a very crude lens mounted in it, were used to look at objects that were descriptive to the naked eye, yet captivating magnified. This lead to more serious builders, which in 1590, constructed the first light microscope for viewing of tiny structures.

Galileo once again had an idea how to excellent this system, and advanced the first focusing microscope. After Anton van Leeuwenhoek's contribution to microscopy, Robert Hook increased the efficiency of his light microscope design.

In Europe, the manufacture was streamlined, yet nothing advanced to any spectacular degree. In the middle of the 19th Century, Charles A. Spencer made the most elegant and useful instruments which all contemporary microscope are modeled today.

Today's high-powered microscopes used in the medical, biological, metallurgical, and geological fields are the outcome of the vigilance of early microscopy pioneers. Without those first glimpses through those primitive curved glasses we would not have the capability to diagnose disease, excellent fabrication, or see the tiny universe in a drop of water.

A Brief History of the Microscope

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