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compound microscope
The first compound microscope was made by Hans and Zacharias
Janssen -
Cell first observed
Robert Hooke, an English scientist, discovered a honeycomb-like structure in a cork slice using a primitive compound microscope. He only saw cell walls as this was dead tissue. He coined the term "cell" for these individual compartments he saw. -
Anton van Leeuwenhoek creates and uses first real microscope
Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch biologist, looks at pond water under a microscope he made lenses for. -
animalcules
Anton van Leeuwenhoek made several more discoveries on a microscopic level, eventually publishing a letter to the Royal Society in which he included detailed drawings of what he saw. Among these was the first protozoa and bacteria discovered -
Discovery of nucleus
Robert Brown, an English botanist, discovered the nucleus in plant cells. -
building blocks of plants
Matthias Jakob Schleiden, a German botanist, proposes that all plant tissues are composed of cells and that cells are the basic building blocks of all plants. This statement was the first generalised statement about cells. -
Creation of early cell theory
Theodor Schwann, a German botanist reached the conclusion that not only plants but animal tissues are also composed of cells. This ended debates that plants and animals were fundamentally different in structure. He also pulled together and organised the previous statement on cells into one theory, which states: 1 - Cells are organisms and all organisms consist of one or more cells 2 - The cell is the basic unit of structure for all organisms -
Sex cells are now cells
Albrecht von Roelliker discovers that sperm and eggs are also cells. -
Basic units of life
Carl Heinrich Braun reworks the cell theory, calling cells the basic unit of life. -
3rd part added
Rudolf Virchow, a German physiologist/physician/pathologist added the 3rd part to the cell theory. The original is Greek and states Omnis cellula e cellula. This translates as all cells develop only from existing cells. Virchow was also the first to propose that diseased cells come from healthy cells. -
Cell division
Walter Flemming described cell division (mitosis) from observations
on living and stained cells