Zacharias Janssen, credited with inventing the microscope.

Credit: Public domain.

For millennia, the smallest thing humans could see was about as wide as a
human hair. When the microscope was invented around 1590, suddenly we
saw a new world of living things in our water, in our food and under our nose.

But it's unclear who invented the microscope. Some historians say it
was Hans Lippershey, most famous for filing the first patent for a telescope.
Other evidence points to Hans and Zacharias Janssen, a father-son team of
spectacle makers living in the same town as Lippershey.

Janssen or Lippershey?
Hans Lippershey, also spelled Lipperhey, was born in Wesel, Germany in
1570, but moved to Holland, which was then enjoying a period of innovation
in art and science called the Dutch Golden Age. Lippershey settled in
Middelburg, where he made spectacles, binoculars and some of the earliest
microscopes and telescopes.

Also living in Middelburg were Hans and Zacharias Janssen. Historians

attribute the invention of the microscope to the Janssens, thanks to letters by
the Dutch diplomat William Boreel.

In the 1650s, Boreel wrote a letter to the physician of the French king in
which he described the microscope. In his letter, Boreel said Zacharias
Janssen started writing to him about a microscope in the early 1590s,
although Boreel only saw a microscope himself years later. Some historians
argue Hans Janssen helped build the microscope, as Zacharias was a
teenager in the 1590s.

Reproduction of first compound microscope made by Hans and Zacharias Janssen,

circa 1590. From the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, D.C.
Credit: Public domain.

Early microscopes
The early Janssen microscopes were compound microscopes, which use at
least two lenses. The objective lens is positioned close to the object and
produces an image that is picked up and magnified further by the second
lens, called the eyepiece.

A Middelburg museum has one of the earliest Janssen microscopes, dated to

1595. It had three sliding tubes for different lenses, no tripod and was
capable of magnifying three to nine times the true size. News about the
microscopes spread quickly across Europe.

Galileo Galilei soon improved upon the compound microscope design in

1609. Galileo called his device an occhiolino, or "little eye."

English scientist Robert Hooke improved the microscope, too, and explored
the structure of snowflakes, fleas, lice and plants. He coined the term "cell"
from the Latin cella, which means "small room," because he compared the
cells he saw in cork to the small rooms that monks lived in. In 1665, and
detailed his observations in the book "Micrographia."

Early compound microscopes provided more magnification than single lens

microscopes; however, they also distorted the image more. Dutch scientist
Antoine van Leeuwenhoek designed high-powered single lens microscopes in
the 1670s. With these he was the first to describe sperm (or spermatozoa)
from dogs and humans. He also studied yeast, red blood cells, bacteria from
the mouth and protozoa. Van Leeuwenhoek's single lens microscopes could
magnify up to 270 times larger than actual size. Single lens microscopes
remained popular well into the 1830s, as all types of microscopes improved.

Scientists were also developing new ways to prepare and contrast their
specimens. In 1882, the German physician Robert Koch presented his
discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacilli responsible for
tuberculosis. Koch went on to use his staining technique to isolate the
bacteria responsible for cholera.
The very best microscopes were approaching a limit by the beginning of the
20th century. A traditional optical (light) microscope can't resolve objects
smaller than the wavelength of visible light. But in 1931, German scientists
Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll overcame this theoretical barrier with the electron
microscope.

Microscopes evolve
Ernst Ruska was born the last of five children on Christmas Day 1906, in
Heidelberg, Germany. He studied electronics at the Technical College in
Munich and went on to study high voltage and vacuum technology at the
Technical College of Berlin. It was there that Ruska and his adviser, Dr. Max
Knoll, first created a “lens” of a magnetic field and electrical current. By
1933, the pair built an electron microscope that could surpass the
magnifying limits of the optical microscope at the time.
Ernst won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work. The electron
microscope could achieve much higher resolution because an electron's
wavelength is smaller than the wavelength of visible light, especially when
the electron is sped up in a vacuum.

Both electron and light microscopy advanced in the 20th century. Today, labs
may use fluorescent tags or polarized filters to view specimens, or they use
computers to capture and analyze images that wouldn't be visible to the
human eye. There are reflecting microscopes, phase contrast microscopes,
confocal microscopes and even ultraviolet microscopes. Modern microscopes
can even image a single atom.

A microscope (from the Ancient Greek: μικρός, mikrós, "small" and σκοπεῖν, skopeîn, "to look" or
"see") is an instrument used to see objects that are too small to be seen by the naked
eye. Microscopy is the science of investigating small objects and structures using such an
instrument. Microscopic means invisible to the eye unless aided by a microscope.
There are many types of microscopes, and they may be grouped in different ways. One way is to
describe the way the instruments interact with a sample to create images, either by sending a beam
of light or electrons to a sample in its optical path, or by scanning across, and a short distance from
the surface of a sample using a probe. The most common microscope (and the first to be invented)
is the optical microscope, which uses light to pass through a sample to produce an image. Other
major types of microscopes are the fluorescence microscope, the electron microscope (both
the transmission electron microscope and the scanning electron microscope) and the various types
of scanning probe microscopes.[1]