subject: A Brief History Of The Microscope [print this page] From the beginning, man has suspected that there were worlds hidden from his naked eye. If he could look very closely at a drop of pond water, he could barely perceive things moving of their own accord. This tantalizing discovery led to the need to "see" closer.
Since Ancient times there has been glass and the forming of glass objects. During the time of Pliny the Elder, around the First Century A.D., there were globes of glass or crystal that were shaped just right, enabling the "seer" to visualize things held under it at a magnified state. It was also interesting to ancient scientists that light from the sun was focused to a point, causing parchment to burn.
All of this developed into serious thinking by early scientists. If they could control the shape of the crystal or glass, they could control the amount of magnification. Thus the first microscopes were born. The history of the microscope follows a wonderful timeline in just a short period, as we will examine in this article.
Understanding the physics of light came about in the third century B.C., when Euclid wrote the Optica. In this writing he describes the rules of reflected light, and is considered one of the Father of Optics, yet so many pioneers came after him, utilizing his ideas and mathematics to perfect the methods of magnification.
In the early 1300's, Bernard of Gordon, a French Physicist, made the use of lenses, so named for their shape like lentel seeds, to correct visual aberrations in the human eye. This invention lead to the interest in making the human eye even better, such as looking at the stars or peeking into the microscopic world.
Galileo tinkered with lenses to create the first telescope. The lenses were primitively ground glass, yet they revealed all of Jupiter's moons. Similarly, van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch dry goods clerk, made spherical glass lenses and mounted them in a small holder with a simple screw system, thus enabling focus control. With this early microscope he observed bacteria, yeasts, protozoa, and even human blood corpuscles.
After this discovery, simple "flea glasses", or tubes with a very crude lens mounted in it, were used to look at objects that were visible to the naked eye, yet fascinating magnified. This lead to more serious builders, which in 1590, constructed the first light microscope for viewing of tiny structures.
Galileo once again had an idea how to perfect this system, and developed the first focusing microscope. After Anton van Leeuwenhoek's contribution to microscopy, Robert Hook increased the efficiency of his light microscope design.
In Europe, the design was streamlined, yet nothing advanced to any spectacular degree. In the middle of the 19th Century, Charles A. Spencer made the most elegant and useful instruments which all modern microscope are modeled today.
Today's high-powered microscopes used in the medical, biological, metallurgical, and geological fields are the outcome of the vigilance of early microscopy pioneers. Without those first glimpses through those primitive curved glasses we would not have the ability to diagnose disease, perfect fabrication, or see the tiny universe in a drop of water.
by: Andrew Long
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