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Zacharias Jansenn Discovered that putting two lenses together made things bigger. He created the first microscope.
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Robert Hooke studies various object with his microscope and publishes his results in Micrographia. Among his work were a description of cork and its ability to float in water.
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anton van Leeuwenhoek used one lens and he looked at blood and plants and was the first to describe bacteria.
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Joseph Jackson Lister reduces the problem with spherical aberration by showing that several weak lenses used together at certain distances gave good magnification without blurring the image.
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Ernst Abbe formulates a mathematical theory about the wave length of light. he gets the maxuim resolution
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Richard Zsigmondy develops the ultramicroscope and is able to study objects below the wavelength of light.
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Frits Zernike invents the phase-contrast microscope that allows the study of colourless and transparent biological material.
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Ernst Ruska develops the electron microscope. The ability to use electrons in microscopy greatly improves the resolution and greatly expands the borders of exploration.
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Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invent the scanning tunneling microscope that gives three-dimensional images of objects down to the atomic level.