-
100
1st Century BC
Romans were experimenting with glass and found objects appereared larger when viewed thorugh the new material. -
200
2nd Century
Claudius Ptolemy described a stick appearing to bend in a pool of water, and accurately recorded the angles to within half a degree. -
Jan 1, 1101
12th Century
Salvino DA'rmate from Italy made the first ever eye glass, providing the wearer with an element of magnification for one eye. -
1590
two dutch spectacle makers, Zacrias Jansen and g=his father Hans started experimenting by mounting two lenses in a tube, the first compund microscope. -
1609
Galileo Galilei develops a compund microscope with a convex and a concave lens. -
1665
Robert Hooke's book Michrographia officially documented a wide range of observations through the microscope. -
1674
Anton van Leeuwenhoek used his knowledge of grinding lenses to achieve greater magnification which he utilised to make a microscope, enabling detailed observations to be made of bacteria. -
1826
Joeseph Jackson Lister created an achromaticlens to eradicating the chromatic effect caused by different wavelengths of light. -
1860s
Ernst Abbe discovers the Abbe sine condition (a condition that must be fulfilled by a lens or other optical system in order for it to produce sharp images), a breakthrough in microscope design, which was until then largely based on trial and error. -
1931
Ernst Ruska starts to build the first electron microscope.
