-
100
1st Century BC
Romans experimented with glass and found that objects appeared larger when viewed through this new material. -
200
2nd century BC
Claudius Ptolemy described a stick appearing to bend in a glass of water, and then accurately recorded the angles to within half a degree. -
Jan 1, 1101
12th Century
Salvino D'Armate from Italy made the first eye glass, providing people with an element of magnification to one eye. -
1590
Two Dutch spectacle makers, Zacharias Jansen and his father Hans started experimenting by mounting two lenses in a tube, The first compound microscope. -
1609
Galileo Galilei develops a compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens. -
1665
Robert Hooke's book called Micrographia officially documented a wide range of observations through the microscope. -
1674
Anton van Leeuwenhoek used his knowledge of grinding lenses to achieve higher magnification which he used to make a microscope, with detailed observations to be made of bacteria. -
1826
Joseph Jackson Lister created an achromatic lens to eliminate the chromatic effect caused by different wavelengths of light. -
1860's
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.
