History of optical microscopes

The concept of magnification has long been known. About 1267 English philosopher Roger Bacon wrote in Perspectiva, “[We] may number the smallest particles of dust and sand by reason of the greatness of the angle under which we may see them,” and in 1538 Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro wrote in Homocentrica, “If anyone should look through two spectacle glasses, one being superimposed on the other, he will see everything much larger.”

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Three Dutch spectacle makers—Hans Jansen, his son Zacharias Jansen, and Hans Lippershey—have received credit for inventing the compound microscope about 1590. The first portrayal of a microscope was drawn about 1631 in the Netherlands. It was clearly of a compound microscope, with an eyepiece and an objective lens. This kind of instrument, which came to be made of wood and cardboard, often adorned with polished fish skin, became increasingly popular in the mid-17th century and was used by the English natural philosopher Robert Hooke to provide regular demonstrations for the new Royal Society. These demonstrations commenced in 1663, and two years later Hooke published a folio volume titled Micrographia, which introduced a wide range of microscopic views of familiar objects (fleas, lice, and nettles among them). In this book he coined the term cell.

Hidden in the unnumbered pages of Micrographia’s preface is a description of how a single high-powered lens could be made into a serviceable microscope, and it was using this design that the Dutch civil servant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek began his pioneering observations of freshwater microorganisms in the 1670s. He made his postage-stamp-sized microscopes by hand, and the best of them could resolve details around 0.7 μm. His fine specimens discovered in excellent condition at the Royal Society more than three centuries later prove what a great technician he was. Using his simple microscope, Leeuwenhoek effectively launched microbiology in 1674, and single-lensed microscopes remained popular until the 1850s. In 1827 they were used by Scottish botanist Robert Brown to demonstrate the ubiquity of the cell nucleus, a term he coined in 1831.

Simple microscopes using single lenses can generate fine images; however, they can also produce spurious colours due to chromatic aberration, in which different wavelengths of light do not come to the same focus. The aberrations were worse in the compound microscopes of the time, because the lenses magnified the aberrations at least as much as they magnified the images. Although the compound microscopes were beautiful objects that conferred status on their owners, they produced inferior images. In 1733 the amateur English optician Chester Moor Hall found by trial and error that a combination of a convex crown-glass lens and a concave flint-glass lens could help to correct chromatic aberration in a telescope, and in 1774 Benjamin Martin of London produced a pioneering set of colour-corrected lenses for a microscope.

The appearance of new varieties of optical glasses encouraged continued development of the microscope in the 19th century, and considerable improvements were made in understanding the geometric optics of image formation. The concept of an achromatic (non-colour-distorting) microscope objective was finally introduced in 1791 by Dutch optician Francois Beeldsnijder, and the English scientist Joseph Jackson Lister in 1830 published a work describing a theoretical approach to the complete design of microscope objectives. The physics of lens construction was examined by German physicist Ernst Abbe. In 1868 he invented an apochromatic system of lenses, which had even better colour correction than achromatic lenses, and in 1873 he published a comprehensive analysis of lens theory. Light microscopes that were produced in the closing quarter of the 19th century reached the effective limits of optical microscopy. Subsequent instruments, such as phase-contrast microscopes, interference microscopes, and confocal microscopes, solved specific problems that had arisen during the study of specimens such as living cells.

The simple microscope

Principles

The simple microscope consists of a single lens traditionally called a loupe. The most familiar present-day example is a reading or magnifying glass. Present-day higher-magnification lenses are often made with two glass elements that produce a colour-corrected image. They can be worn around the neck packaged in a cylindrical form that can be held in place immediately in front of the eye. These are generally referred to as eye loupes or jewelers’ lenses. The traditional simple microscope was made with a single magnifying lens, which was often of sufficient optical quality to allow the study of microscopical organisms including Hydra and protists.