The History of the Microscope

The First Compound Microscope

Jan 1, 1590

Zaccharias Janssen and his son Hans Janssen were Dutch spectacle and glass makers. They realized that if you put lens into a tube, the object the tube was aiming at was drastically altered. They created the first compound microscope, which has two lens.

How we got the word 'cell'

Jan 1, 1665

Robert Hooke looked at a small piece of cork in a microscope. It looked like tiny monk abodes, so he called it cells. But his microscopes were very bad quality.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek

Jan 1, 1674

He tried grinding and polishing the lens of a microscope. The result was a lens that could magnify objects 300 times their size! He was know as the 'Father of Microscopy' because of his breakthroughs in the subject. He created more than 240 microscopes.