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Romans were experimenting with glass and found objects appereared larger when viewed thorugh the new material.
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Claudius Ptolemy described a stick appearing to bend in a pool of water, and accurately recorded the angles to within half a degree.
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Salvino DA'rmate from Italy made the first ever eye glass, providing the wearer with an element of magnification for one eye.
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two dutch spectacle makers, Zacrias Jansen and g=his father Hans started experimenting by mounting two lenses in a tube, the first compund microscope.
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Galileo Galilei develops a compund microscope with a convex and a concave lens.
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Robert Hooke's book Michrographia officially documented a wide range of observations through the microscope.
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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.
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Joeseph Jackson Lister created an achromaticlens to eradicating the chromatic effect caused by different wavelengths of light.
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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.
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Ernst Ruska starts to build the first electron microscope.
