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Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans put several lenses in a tube and made a very important discovery. The object near the end of the tube appeared to be greatly enlarged.
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Robert Hooke published "Microgphia" a folio of thirty-eight copper-plate illustrations of objects drawn with the aid of his microscope. He was the first to describe and coin the phrase "cell" when observing a slice of cork using a microscope power of 30X.
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Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, did an experiment to determine if rotting meat turned into flies. He found that meat cannot turn into flies and only flies could make more flies. This was an important experiment because it helped to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation.
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Antony van Leeuwenhoek a tradesman of Delft, Holland with no formal training discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells and more. All of this from a very simple device that could magnify up to 300X.
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From 1745 to 1748 John Needham, a Scottish clergyman and naturalist, showed that soup that had been exposed to the air contained many micro organisms. He claimed that there was a "life force" present in the molecules of all inorganic matter, including air and the oxygen in it, that could cause spontaneous generation to occur.
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Remak discovered that the origin of cells was from the division of previous cells.
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Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden formally propose the "Cell Theory."
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Theodor Schwann proposed that all organisms are composed of cells
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Rudolf Virchow published his now-famous aphorism omnis cellula e cellula ("every cell stems from another cell"). He also stated that all diseases involve changes in normal cells.
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Up to this point, much of the design of microscopes had been trial and error. He made clear the difference between magnification and resolution and criticized the practice of using eye pieces with too high a magnification as "empty magnification." His widely used formula to calculate resolution is based on his wave light theory.
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Ernst Leitz microscope is introduced with a revolving mount
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Walther Flemming discovers mitosis.
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August Kohler had worked out light source and condenser position to obtain the best image projection.
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Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch both become engaged in microscopy and the study of bacteria.
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Richard Altman identified the mitochondria using a dye technique, and called them "bioblasts"
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The first commercial UV microscope by Zeiss. The resolution based on Abbe's formula is twice that of a visible light microscope
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Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska construct the first electron microscope.
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Ruska builds the first electron microscope that exceeds the resolution of the light microscope. It has an accelerating voltage of 75 kV.
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Siemens supplies the first commercially available electron microscope.
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Scanning Probe Microscope is invented and works by measuring current.
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Atomic Force Microscope is invented and measures force instead of current.
