-
In about 1595, Zacharias Janssen invented the mircoscope.
-
Robert Hooke, looked at a silver cork through a microscope lens and noticed some "pores" or "cells" in it.
-
Anton van Leeuwenhoek built a simple microscope with only one lens to examine blood, yeast, insects and many other tiny objects.
-
Technical innovations improved microscopes, leading to microscopy becoming popular among scientists.
-
Joseph Jackson Lister reduces spherical aberration or the "chromatic effect" by showing that several weak lenses used together at certain distances gave good magnification without blurring the image.
-
Ernst Abbe, then research director of the Zeiss Optical Works, wrote a mathematical formula called the "Abbe Sine Condition".
-
Richard Zsigmondy developed the ultramicroscope that could study objects below the wavelength of light.
-
Frits Zernike invented the phase-contrast microscope that allowed for the study of colorless and transparent biological materials.
-
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invented the scanning tunneling microscope that gives three-dimensional images of objects down to the atomic level.
