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Zacharias Janssen was a Dutch spectacle-maker from Middelburg associated with the invention of the first optical telescope. Janssen is sometimes also credited for inventing the first truly compound microscope.
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Robert Hooke discovered cells by looking at a piece of cork under a microscope.
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It was Antony Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a Dutch draper and scientist, and one of the pioneers of microscopy who in the late 17th century became the first man to make and use a real microscope. He made his own simple microscopes, which had a multiple lenses, and were hand-held. (Note that the invention of the compound microscope is also accredited to Zacharias Janssen and his brother.)
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Leeunhowen discovered microorganisms after creating a very powerful microscope.
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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.
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Karl Rudolphi and J.H.F. Link were the first to prove that cells were independent of each other and had their own cell walls.
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British botanist Robert Brown first discovered the nucleus in plant cells.
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Theodor Schwann, a German botanist reached the conclusion that not only plants, but animal tissue as well is composed of cells. This ended debates that plants and animals were fundamentally different in structure. He also pulled together and organized 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
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Scientist Carl Heinrich Braun revised the cell theory with his interpretation that cells are the basic unit of life.
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Rudolf Virchow concluded that Omnis cellula e cellula, which translates roughly from Latin to “cells only arise from other cells.”