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Period: 2 BCE to 2 BCE
In the beginning...
Claudius Ptolemy described a stick appearing to bend in a pool of water, and accurately recorded the angles to within half a degree. -
Period: 1 CE to 1 CE
And then there were the Romans
Romans were experimenting with glass and found objects appeared larger when viewed through this new material. -
Period: 1284 to 1284
And then in Italy...
Salvino D'Armate made the first eye glass, providing the wearer with an element of magnification to one eye. -
Period: to
And then all the way in the Netherlands
Zacharias Jansen and his father Hans started experimenting by mounting two lenses in a tube, the first compound microscope. -
Period: to
As we return to Italy...
Galileo Galilei develops a compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens. -
Period: to
56 year later in England...
56 years later, the knowledge of the Microscope gets further, when Robert Hooke's book: "Micrographia" officially documented a wide range of observations through the microscope. -
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Back to the Netherlands...
In 1674 Anton van Leeuwenhoek used his knowledge of grinding lenses to achieve greater magnification which he utilised to make a microscope, enabling detailed observations to be made of bacteria. -
Period: to
In 1826, we move back to England...
Joseph Jackson Lister created an achromatic lens to eradicate the chromatic effect caused by different wavelengths of light. -
Period: to
Meanwhile in Germany
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. -
Period: to
Years later in Germany...
Ernst Ruska starts to build the first electron microscope. -
Period: to
Evolution
A light microscope (LM) is an instrument that uses visible light and magnifying lenses to examine small objects not visible to the naked eye, or in finer detail than the naked eye allows.