The microscope has helped us in seeing what used to be unknown to our predecessors. Just how were our historical ancestors able to come up with such a powerful optical science tool? And who in history are we to thank for being the father of modern microscopy?  This is the question that students will be asking their teachers and parents when they are first given their own kids microscopes to begin experimenting with.

The beginning of the history of the microscope started in the unrecorded past with a piece of transparent crystal that the ancient people picked up and looked through. As early as 63 A.D. gem-cutters may have used glasses filled with water as optical magnifiers. Roman historian Seneca wrote about reading small letters with the use of a glass globe filled with water. Seneca, Pliny the Elder and other Roman philosophers also mentioned magnifiers and “burning glasses” in their ancient writings.

In a publication dated 1052, an Arabian physician named Alhagen described the use of two lenses to enlarge images. In Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics written between 1011 and 1021 was Abba Ibn Firnas’s corrective lenses. This was believed to lay the foundation for research on the optical magnifying glass.

Two centuries later in history, Roger Bacon mentioned the enlarged image effect until a Florentine named Salvino d’Armato degli Armati put lenses in a frame in order to solve vision problems. He became the inventor of spectacles. In this 13th century was when the first accurate optical lenses were made.

Only three hundred years later, scientists discovered the use of lenses in studying minute structures of objects. The invention of the compound microscope was attributed to a pair of Dutch spectacle makers, Hans and Zachariaz Janssen around 1590. They discovered the enlarged appearance of nearby objects while experimenting with several optic lenses. A century later, Galileo improved the early history microscope instrument with a focusing device.

In 1637, history records show that a diagram of a microscope was published by French philosopher and physicist Rene Descartes. In this diagram is a single-lens instrument which uses a concave mirror to reflect light onto the object.

It was not until in 1675 when a lens maker named Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovered the world that can be seen under lenses that are magnified 300 times. Leeuwenhoek made hundreds of single-lens microscope and with them, made discoveries from bacteria to protozoa to red blood cells.  He is generally credited as being the father of the microscope in historical records.

Since then, microscopes became famous throughout the world. In the 17th century, Englishman Robert Hooke drew pictures of cork as seen through his basic early microscope. He re-confirmed Leeuwenhoek’s findings of the existence of living organisms in water while improving the early microscope’s design. He also used small glass balls made of fused threads of drawn glass instead of convex lenses. These glass balls were set in metal plates and the examined object can be mounted on a movable arm.

In the middle of the 19th century, history shows us that major improvements and manufacturing of compound microscopes were made. In 1847 Carl Zeiss started manufacturing simple microscopes and began to produce early compound microscopes by 1857.

In 1933, the first electron microscope was co-invented by Ernst Ruska which won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. An electron microscope can magnify objects a hundred times than that of a simple optical light microscope.

By 1981, the scanning tunnelling microscope was invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer. This gives three-dimensional images of objects to the atomic level. It is the strongest microscope to the present day.  Who knows what future optical microscopy equipment will be developed to give even greater microscope resolution and clarity of imaging at the highest power magnifications.  We have seen a rich history of the microscope and are almost as certain to see as bright of a future for the world of microscopy.