Who Invented The Microscope

Have you ever wondered who invented the microscope? Well as a child you might remember yourself playing with a magnifying glass looking at ants and other insects. This was the same behavior Romans had during the 1^st century when glass was invented. They realized that when you look at an object through glass, the object is magnified. Well the concept is the same with the microscope.

Like most inventions today there are disputes in origins of the original inventors. The same dispute applies to who invented the microscope. It was during the 12th and 13th century that spectacle makes started creating spectacles with lenses. They saw; excuse the pun, the benefits of using glass to magnify objects from afar. This was until the late 1590’s when two Dutch spectacles makers, Hans and his son Zaccharias Janssen, started to further experiment with the use of lenses to magnify objects. They discovered that when you used more than on lenses at a time you could increase the magnifying abilities of the glass. They placed several lenses into a tube and noticed that you could amplify the object numerous times. This was the first know use or creation of a compounded microscope. Not to long after this experiment, Italian instrument maker Galileo also made his first lens tube.   

Galileo added some focusing so that he could look at the stars however, he discovered that to look at the stars you needed a tube two feet long, yet to view objects on his table he needed a tube 3 times longer. Many years passed until Anthony van Leeuwenhoek of Holland discovered a way to improve on the lens tube. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek was a cloth merchant and used the lens tube to inspect the quality of textiles. When he noticed the benefits of the lens tube he improved on it. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek ground five hundred and fifty lenses to make his new lens tube that had a magnifying power of 500 and could view objects one millionth of a meter. He wrote some 190 letters to the Royal Society telling them what he had discovered by viewing objects and water through his lens tube. He was able to view bacteria and blood cells. Anthony van Leeuwenhoek today is known as the “Father of Microscopy”. Thus, Galileo is one of the individuals to consider when discussing who invented the microscope.

Much work had been done by Robert Hooke who is also known as the “English Father of Microscopy”. He published Micrographia a scientific journal which not only documented what he observed under the microscope in great detail but had influenced other inventors of his age. Robert Hooke’s detailed studies furthered study in the field of microbiology in England and advanced biological science as a whole. Very little improvement was made to the microscope until the 19th century. A company called Zeiss in Germany started producing optical instruments. With the advancement of technology and improved optics, the microscope as we know it today came into being.

Today most microscopes are made in Germany and Japan. With the advent of science and the increased pace of technology microscopes have become affordable and mass produced. Most school laboratories have them and with its wider use more interest have been generated in microbiology. In 1939 the first electron microscope was invented by Ernst Ruska for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Zaccharias Janssen the inventor of the microscope would have been impressed would he have been alive today at how far and how advanced the field of microbiology has come. He would be more impressed by how much development and improvements have been made to the simple microscope to many years later!