The Timeline of the History of the Microscope

By Prosper

  • The Janssen Brothers

    Dutch lens grinders Hans and Zacharias Janssen make the first microscope by placing two lenses in a tube.
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    Hans and Zacharias

    Dutch lens grinders Hans and Zacharias Janssen make the first microscope by placing two lenses in a tube.

  • The Convex and Cocave Lense

    Galileo Galilei develops a compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens.
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    Robert Hooke

    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.

  • First Cells and Bacteria Described Through A Microscope

    Anton van Leeuwenhoek uses a simple microscope with only one lens to look at blood, insects and many other objects. He was first to describe cells and bacteria, seen through his very small microscopes with, for his time, extremely good lenses.

  • Spherical Aberration

    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.

  • An Ultramicroscope

    Richard Zsigmondy develops the ultramicroscope and is able to study objects below the wavelength of light.

  • Phase-contrast microscope

    Frits Zernike invents the phase-contrast microscope that allows the study of colorless and transparent biological materials.

  • The electron microscope

    Ernst Ruska develops the electron microscope. The ability to use electrons in microscopy greatly improves the resolution and greatly expands the borders of exploration.

  • Three-dimensional Images

    Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invent the scanning tunneling microscope that gives three-dimensional images of objects down to the atomic level.