Timeline of microscope technology

Last updated July 23, 2024

1852 microscope Igmicro.jpg — 1852 microscope

c. 700 BC: The "Nimrud lens" of Assyrians manufacture, a rock crystal disk with a convex shape believed to be a burning or magnifying lens.^[1]
13th century: The increase in use of lenses in eyeglasses probably led to the wide spread use of simple microscopes (single lens magnifying glasses) with limited magnification.^[2]
1590: earliest date of a claimed Hans Martens/Zacharias Janssen invention of the compound microscope (claim made in 1655).^[3]^[4]
After 1609: Galileo Galilei is described as being able to close focus his telescope to view small objects close up^[5] and/or looking through the wrong end in reverse to magnify small objects.^[6] A telescope used in this fashion is the same as a compound microscope but historians debate whether Galileo was magnifying small objects or viewing near by objects with his terrestrial telescope (convex objective/concave eyepiece) reversed.^[7]
1619: Earliest recorded description of a compound microscope, Dutch Ambassador Willem Boreel sees one in London in the possession of Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel, an instrument about eighteen inches long, two inches in diameter, and supported on three brass dolphins.^[8]^[9]^[10]
1621: Cornelis Drebbel presents, in London, a compound microscope with a convex objective and a convex eyepiece (a "Keplerian" microscope).
c.1622: Drebbel presents his invention in Rome.
1624: Galileo improves on a compound microscope he sees in Rome and presents his occhiolino to Prince Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei (in English, The Linceans).
1625: Francesco Stelluti and Federico Cesi publish Apiarium, the first account of observations using a compound microscope
1625: Giovanni Faber of Bamberg (1574–1629) of the Linceans, after seeing Galileo's occhiolino, coins the word microscope by analogy with telescope.
1655: In an investigation by Willem Boreel, Dutch spectacle-maker Johannes Zachariassen claims his father, Zacharias Janssen, invented the compound microscope in 1590. Zachariassen's claimed dates are so early it is sometimes assumed, for the claim to be true, that his grandfather, Hans Martens, must have invented it.^[9]^[11] Findings are published by writer Pierre Borel. Discrepancies in Boreel's investigation and Zachariassen's testimony (including misrepresenting his date of birth and role in the invention) has led some historians to consider this claim dubious.^[12]^[3]
1661: Marcello Malpighi observed capillary structures in frog lungs.
1665: Robert Hooke publishes Micrographia , a collection of biological drawings. He coins the word cell for the structures he discovers in cork bark.
1674: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek improves on a simple microscope for viewing biological specimens (see Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes).
1825: Joseph Jackson Lister develops combined lenses that cancelled spherical and chromatic aberration.
1846: Carl Zeiss founded Carl Zeiss AG, to mass-produce microscopes and other optical instruments.
1850s: John Leonard Riddell, Professor of Chemistry at Tulane University, invents the first practical binocular microscope.^[13]
1863: Henry Clifton Sorby develops a metallurgical microscope to observe structure of meteorites.
1860s: Ernst Abbe, a colleague of Carl Zeiss, discovers the Abbe sine condition, a breakthrough in microscope design, which until then was largely based on trial and error. The company of Carl Zeiss exploited this discovery and becomes the dominant microscope manufacturer of its era.
1928: Edward Hutchinson Synge publishes theory underlying the near-field scanning optical microscope
1931: Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska start to build the first electron microscope. It is a transmission electron microscope (TEM).
1936: Erwin Wilhelm Müller invents the field emission microscope.
1938: James Hillier builds another TEM.
1951: Erwin Wilhelm Müller invents the field ion microscope and is the first to see atoms.
1953: Frits Zernike, professor of theoretical physics, receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the phase-contrast microscope.
1955: Georges Nomarski, professor of microscopy, published the theoretical basis of differential interference contrast microscopy.^[14]
1957: Marvin Minsky, a professor at MIT, invents the confocal microscope, an optical imaging technique for increasing optical resolution and contrast of a micrograph by means of using a spatial pinhole to block out-of-focus light in image formation. This technology is a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope.
1967: Erwin Wilhelm Müller adds time-of-flight spectroscopy to the field ion microscope, making the first atom probe and allowing the chemical identification of each individual atom.
1981: Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer develop the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).
1986: Gerd Binnig, Quate, and Gerber invent the atomic force microscope (AFM).
1988: Alfred Cerezo, Terence Godfrey, and George D. W. Smith applied a position-sensitive detector to the atom probe, making it able to resolve materials in three dimensions with near-atomic resolution.
1988: Kingo Itaya invents the electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope.
1991: Kelvin probe force microscope invented.
2008: The scanning helium microscope is introduced.^[15]^[16]^[17]^{[ non-primary source needed ]}

Related Research Articles

$<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lens</span> Optical device which transmits and refracts light$

A lens is a transmissive optical device that focuses or disperses a light beam by means of refraction. A simple lens consists of a single piece of transparent material, while a compound lens consists of several simple lenses (elements), usually arranged along a common axis. Lenses are made from materials such as glass or plastic and are ground, polished, or molded to the required shape. A lens can focus light to form an image, unlike a prism, which refracts light without focusing. Devices that similarly focus or disperse waves and radiation other than visible light are also called "lenses", such as microwave lenses, electron lenses, acoustic lenses, or explosive lenses.

Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view objects and areas of objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye. There are three well-known branches of microscopy: optical, electron, and scanning probe microscopy, along with the emerging field of X-ray microscopy.

A microscope is a laboratory instrument used to examine objects that are too small to be seen by the naked eye. Microscopy is the science of investigating small objects and structures using a microscope. Microscopic means being invisible to the eye unless aided by a microscope.

The optical microscope, also referred to as a light microscope, is a type of microscope that commonly uses visible light and a system of lenses to generate magnified images of small objects. Optical microscopes are the oldest design of microscope and were possibly invented in their present compound form in the 17th century. Basic optical microscopes can be very simple, although many complex designs aim to improve resolution and sample contrast.

Hans Lipperhey, also known as Johann Lippershey or Lippershey, was a German-Dutch spectacle-maker. He is commonly associated with the invention of the telescope, because he was the first one who tried to obtain a patent for it. It is, however, unclear if he was the first one to build a telescope.

The history of the telescope can be traced to before the invention of the earliest known telescope, which appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands, when a patent was submitted by Hans Lippershey, an eyeglass maker. Although Lippershey did not receive his patent, news of the invention soon spread across Europe. The design of these early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. Galileo improved on this design the following year and applied it to astronomy. In 1611, Johannes Kepler described how a far more useful telescope could be made with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens. By 1655, astronomers such as Christiaan Huygens were building powerful but unwieldy Keplerian telescopes with compound eyepieces.

$<span class="mw-page-title-main">Refracting telescope</span> Type of optical telescope$

A refracting telescope is a type of optical telescope that uses a lens as its objective to form an image. The refracting telescope design was originally used in spyglasses and astronomical telescopes but is also used for long-focus camera lenses. Although large refracting telescopes were very popular in the second half of the 19th century, for most research purposes, the refracting telescope has been superseded by the reflecting telescope, which allows larger apertures. A refractor's magnification is calculated by dividing the focal length of the objective lens by that of the eyepiece.

Optics is the branch of physics which involves the behavior and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behavior of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Because light is an electromagnetic wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves exhibit similar properties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zacharias Janssen</span> Dutch optician

Zacharias Janssen; also Zacharias Jansen or Sacharias Jansen; 1585 – pre-1632) was a Dutch spectacle-maker who lived most of his life in Middelburg. He is associated with the invention of the first optical telescope and/or the first truly compound microscope, but these claims may be fabrications put forward by his son.

Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel was a Dutch engineer and inventor. He was the builder of the first operational submarine in 1620 and an innovator who contributed to the development of measurement and control systems, optics and chemistry.

An eyepiece, or ocular lens, is a type of lens that is attached to a variety of optical devices such as telescopes and microscopes. It is named because it is usually the lens that is closest to the eye when someone looks through an optical device to observe an object or sample. The objective lens or mirror collects light from an object or sample and brings it to focus creating an image of the object. The eyepiece is placed near the focal point of the objective to magnify this image to the eyes. The amount of magnification depends on the focal length of the eyepiece.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesco Fontana</span> Italian lawyer and astronomer

Francesco Fontana was an Italian lawyer and an astronomer.

Confocal microscopy, most frequently confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) or laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), is an optical imaging technique for increasing optical resolution and contrast of a micrograph by means of using a spatial pinhole to block out-of-focus light in image formation. Capturing multiple two-dimensional images at different depths in a sample enables the reconstruction of three-dimensional structures within an object. This technique is used extensively in the scientific and industrial communities and typical applications are in life sciences, semiconductor inspection and materials science.

JacobMetius was a Dutch instrument-maker and a specialist in grinding lenses. He is primarily known for the patent application he made for an optical telescope in October 1608, a few weeks after Hans Lippershey submitted a patent for the same device. He was the brother of the geometer and astronomer Adriaan Metius.

Optics began with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, followed by theories on light and vision developed by ancient Greek philosophers, and the development of geometrical optics in the Greco-Roman world. The word optics is derived from the Greek term τα ὀπτικά meaning 'appearance, look'. Optics was significantly reformed by the developments in the medieval Islamic world, such as the beginnings of physical and physiological optics, and then significantly advanced in early modern Europe, where diffractive optics began. These earlier studies on optics are now known as "classical optics". The term "modern optics" refers to areas of optical research that largely developed in the 20th century, such as wave optics and quantum optics.

Differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy, also known as Nomarski interference contrast (NIC) or Nomarski microscopy, is an optical microscopy technique used to enhance the contrast in unstained, transparent samples. DIC works on the principle of interferometry to gain information about the optical path length of the sample, to see otherwise invisible features. A relatively complex optical system produces an image with the object appearing black to white on a grey background. This image is similar to that obtained by phase contrast microscopy but without the bright diffraction halo. The technique was invented by Francis Hughes Smith. The "Smith DIK" was produced by Ernst Leitz Wetzlar in Germany and was difficult to manufacture. DIC was then developed further by Polish physicist Georges Nomarski in 1952.

The stereo, stereoscopic or dissecting microscope is an optical microscope variant designed for low magnification observation of a sample, typically using light reflected from the surface of an object rather than transmitted through it. The instrument uses two separate optical paths with two objectives and eyepieces to provide slightly different viewing angles to the left and right eyes. This arrangement produces a three-dimensional visualization of the sample being examined. Stereomicroscopy overlaps macrophotography for recording and examining solid samples with complex surface topography, where a three-dimensional view is needed for analyzing the detail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Condenser (optics)</span> Type of optical lens

A condenser is an optical lens that renders a divergent light beam from a point light source into a parallel or converging beam to illuminate an object to be imaged.

Sir Willem Boreel, 1st Baronet was a Dutch diplomat.

The Campani compound microscope is a microscope on exhibit at the Museo Galileo in Italy, thought to have been built by optical instrument maker Giuseppe Campani in the second half 17th century. For a time it was thought to have been built by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei but no longer bares that attribution.

References

↑ "The Nimrud lens / the Layard lens". Collection database. The British Museum. Retrieved Oct 21, 2012.
↑ Atti Della Fondazione Giorgio Ronchi E Contributi Dell'Istituto Nazionale Di Ottica, Volume 30, La Fondazione-1975, page 554
1 2 Jan L. Harrington, Technology and Society, Jones & Bartlett Publishers - 2011, page 221
↑ Albert Van Helden; Sven Dupré; Rob van Gent (2010). The Origins of the Telescope. Amsterdam University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-90-6984-615-6.
↑ Robert D. Huerta, Giants of Delft: Johannes Vermeer and the Natural Philosophers: The Parallel Search for Knowledge During the Age of Discovery, Bucknell University Press, 2003, p. 126
↑ A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics, University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 387
↑ William Rosenthal, Spectacles and Other Vision Aids: A History and Guide to Collecting, Norman Publishing, 1996, pp. 391–392
↑ Jerome Ch'en, Nicholas Tarling, Studies in the Social History of China and South-East Asia: Essays in Memory of Victor Purcell, Cambridge University Press, Jun 10, 2010, p. 215
1 2 Albert Van Helden; Sven Dupré; Rob van Gent (2010). The Origins of the Telescope. Amsterdam University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-90-6984-615-6.
↑ Spiers, F. S. (2008-11-30). The Microscope—Its Design, Construction and Applications by F. S. Spiers. Read Books. ISBN 978-1-4437-2594-1 . Retrieved 2010-08-06.
↑ Brian Shmaefsky, Biotechnology 101 - 2006, p. 171
↑ Albert Van Helden; Sven Dupré; Rob van Gent (2010). The Origins of the Telescope. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 32–36, 43. ISBN 978-90-6984-615-6.
↑ Riddell JL (1854). "On the binocular microscope". Q J Microsc Sci. 2: 18–24.
↑ Nomarski, G. (1955). Microinterféromètre différentiel à ondes polarisées. J. Phys. Radium, Paris 16: 9S-11S
↑ Eder, S D; Reisinger, T; Greve, M M; Bracco, G; Holst, B (2012). "Focusing of a neutral helium beam below one micron". New Journal of Physics. 14 (7): 073014. Bibcode:2012NJPh...14g3014E. doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/14/7/073014 . ISSN 1367-2630.
↑ Palau, Adrià Salvador; Eder, Sabrina Daniela; Bracco, Gianangelo; Holst, Bodil (2023). "Neutral helium atom microscopy". Ultramicroscopy. 251. doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113753. hdl: 11250/3128781 . PMID 37285613.
↑ Koch, M.; Rehbein, S.; Schmahl, G.; Reisinger, T.; Bracco, G.; Ernst, W. E.; Holst, B. (2008). "Imaging with neutral atoms: A new matter-wave microscope". Journal of Microscopy. 229 (Pt 1): 1–5. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2818.2007.01874.x. PMID 18173637.

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[1] "The Nimrud lens / the Layard lens". Collection database. The British Museum. Retrieved Oct 21, 2012.

[2] Atti Della Fondazione Giorgio Ronchi E Contributi Dell'Istituto Nazionale Di Ottica, Volume 30, La Fondazione-1975, page 554

[Jan_L._Harrington_2011,_page_221-3] 1 2 Jan L. Harrington, Technology and Society, Jones & Bartlett Publishers - 2011, page 221

[4] Albert Van Helden; Sven Dupré; Rob van Gent (2010). The Origins of the Telescope. Amsterdam University Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-90-6984-615-6.

[5] Robert D. Huerta, Giants of Delft: Johannes Vermeer and the Natural Philosophers: The Parallel Search for Knowledge During the Age of Discovery, Bucknell University Press, 2003, p. 126

[6] A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics, University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 387

[7] William Rosenthal, Spectacles and Other Vision Aids: A History and Guide to Collecting, Norman Publishing, 1996, pp. 391–392

[8] Jerome Ch'en, Nicholas Tarling, Studies in the Social History of China and South-East Asia: Essays in Memory of Victor Purcell, Cambridge University Press, Jun 10, 2010, p. 215

[The_Origins_of_the_Telescope-9] 1 2 Albert Van Helden; Sven Dupré; Rob van Gent (2010). The Origins of the Telescope. Amsterdam University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-90-6984-615-6.

[10] Spiers, F. S. (2008-11-30). The Microscope—Its Design, Construction and Applications by F. S. Spiers. Read Books. ISBN 978-1-4437-2594-1 . Retrieved 2010-08-06.

[11] Brian Shmaefsky, Biotechnology 101 - 2006, p. 171

[12] Albert Van Helden; Sven Dupré; Rob van Gent (2010). The Origins of the Telescope. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 32–36, 43. ISBN 978-90-6984-615-6.

[Riddell-13] Riddell JL (1854). "On the binocular microscope". Q J Microsc Sci. 2: 18–24.

[14] Nomarski, G. (1955). Microinterféromètre différentiel à ondes polarisées. J. Phys. Radium, Paris 16: 9S-11S

[15] Eder, S D; Reisinger, T; Greve, M M; Bracco, G; Holst, B (2012). "Focusing of a neutral helium beam below one micron". New Journal of Physics. 14 (7): 073014. Bibcode:2012NJPh...14g3014E. doi: 10.1088/1367-2630/14/7/073014 . ISSN 1367-2630.

[16] Palau, Adrià Salvador; Eder, Sabrina Daniela; Bracco, Gianangelo; Holst, Bodil (2023). "Neutral helium atom microscopy". Ultramicroscopy. 251. doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113753. hdl: 11250/3128781 . PMID 37285613.

[17] Koch, M.; Rehbein, S.; Schmahl, G.; Reisinger, T.; Bracco, G.; Ernst, W. E.; Holst, B. (2008). "Imaging with neutral atoms: A new matter-wave microscope". Journal of Microscopy. 229 (Pt 1): 1–5. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2818.2007.01874.x. PMID 18173637.

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