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Romans experimented with glass and found that objects appeared larger when viewed through this new material.
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Claudius Ptolemy described a stick appearing to bend in a glass of water, and then accurately recorded the angles to within half a degree.
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Salvino D'Armate from Italy made the first eye glass, providing people with an element of magnification to one eye.
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Two Dutch spectacle makers, Zacharias Jansen and his father Hans started experimenting by mounting two lenses in a tube, The first compound microscope.
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Galileo Galilei develops a compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens.
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Robert Hooke's book called Micrographia 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 higher magnification which he used to make a microscope, with detailed observations to be made of bacteria.
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Joseph Jackson Lister created an achromatic lens to eliminate 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.
