History of

Microscope

About 1590, two Dutch

spectacle makers,
Zaccharias Janssen and
his son Hans, while
experimenting with several
lenses in a tube, discovered
that nearby objects
appeared greatly enlarged.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek

(1632-1723)
The

father of microscopy.
He used a single lens
microscope and He used
a compound microscope.

The close up
image shows the
simplicity of a Van
Leeuwenhoek
microscope. A
subject was placed
on the needle and
could be
positioned with the
adjusting screw.

Robert Hooke
the English father of
microscopy.
re-confirmed Anton van
Leeuwenhoek's discoveries of
the existence of tiny living
organisms in a drop of water.

Gerd Binnig
was

awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics
in 1986 for his work
in scanning tunneling
microscopy.

What

is
Scanning
Tunneling
Microscope?

. It provides a threedimensional profile of the

surface which is very useful
for characterizing surface
roughness, observing
surface defects, and
determining the size and
conformation of molecules
and aggregates on the

--END--

Timeline

1590 Two Dutch eye glass

makers, Zaccharias Janssen and
son Hans Janssen experimented
with multiple lenses placed in a
tube.
1665 English physicist,Robert
Hookelooked at a sliver of cork
through a microscope lens and
noticed some "pores" or "cells"
in it.

1674Anton van
Leeuwenhoek built a simple
microscope with only one lens
to examine blood, yeast,
insects and many other tiny
objects.
18th century Technical
innovations improved
microscopes, leading to
microscopy becoming popular

1830 Joseph Jackson Lister

reduces spherical aberration or
the "chromatic effect" by
showing that several weak lenses
used together at certain
distances gave good
magnification without blurring
the image.
1872Ernst Abbe, then research
director of the Zeiss Optical
Works, wrote a mathematical

1903 Richard Zsigmondy

developed the ultra
microscope that could study
objects below the wavelength
of light.
1932 Frits Zernike invented
the phase-contrast
microscope that allowed for
the study of colorless and
transparent biological

1931 Ernst Ruska co-invented

theelectron microscope for
which he won the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1986.
1981 Gerd Binnig and Heinrich
Rohrer invented thescanning
tunneling microscope that gives
three-dimensional images of
objects down to the atomic level.
Binnig and Rohrer won the Nobel
Prize in Physics in 1986.