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Zacharias Janssen
generally believed to be the first investigator to invent the compound microscope. However, because the accomplishment is generally agreed among historians to be dated in the 1590s, most scholars believe that his father, Hans, must have played an important role in the creation of the instrument. -
Hans Janssen
Helped his brother Zacharias invent the first microscope which lead to future discoveries -
Robert Hooke
In 1665, the English physicist Robert Hooke looked at a sliver of cork through a microscope lens and noticed some "pores" or "cells" in it. Robert Hooke believed the cells had served as containers for the "noble juices" or "fibrous threads" of the once-living cork tree. He thought these cells existed only in plants, since he and his scientific contemporaries had observed the structures only in plant material. -
Anton Van Leeuwenhoek
The father of microscopy, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek of Holland started as an apprentice in a dry goods store where magnifying glasses were used to count the threads in cloth. Anton van Leeuwenhoek was inspired by the glasses used by drapers to inspect the quality of cloth. Anton Van Leeuwenhoek 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 capillaries. -
Theodor Schwann
Schwann studied medicine at the University of Berlin under Johannes Muller, a brilliant university teacher, teaching many German physiologist of the 19th Century. still at the university in Berlin, he discovered in the gastric juice pepsin, a digestive enzyme for protein. It was the first enzyme that could be presented from an animal tissue. -
Matthias Jakob Schleiden
Matthias Jakob Schleiden was a German botanist and co-founder of the cell theory, along with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow. Born in Hamburg, Schleiden was educated at Heidelberg, then practiced law in Hamburg, but soon developed his love for the botany into a full-time pursuit. Schleiden preferred to study plant structure under the microscope. While a professor of botany at the University of Jena, he wrote Contributions to Phytogenesis (1838), in which he stat -
Rudolf Virchow
Virchow had many great discoveries. In many of his speeches he stated that advanced research could be done if the doctors were willing to take science to the next level. This included making clinical observations, performing animal experimentations, and studying microscopic pathological anatomy. He believed that movement would help the German medical community to shift away from being a largely theoretical activity. As a well known scientist, he was the first person to recognize leukemia.
