Who invented the microscope?

In the future, the 1900s may be remembered as the Breakthrough Century. For these are years of astounding revelations in science, especially in the sciences of biology and medicine. Much of this new work is due to the development and use of an entirely new type of microscope.

Science and its patient researchers, of course, need fine and complex instruments, much sharper than the human senses. The microscope is an instrument which makes small objects look larger. However, the human eye does not look through the most modern of these instruments, the electron microscope. This inst anent presents the scientists with a photograph called an electron micrograph. It may be the picture of a virus magnified two million times.

This modern miracle is indirectly descended from the more familiar microscope which is made from a glass lens or two glass lenses set in a metal tube. The lens in a microscope is similar to the round glass lens in an ordinary magnifying class, thick in the middle and slimming down towards the edges. Its magic qualities most likely were discovered soon after our remote ancestors learned to make glass.

We know that glass and glazes were being made thousands of years ago. We know that Euclid, who worked out the laws of geometry, studied a glass lens some 2,500 years ago. Through the ages, many other scientists used simple magnifying glasses and around 1235 A.D., the English scientist Roger Bacon put them to a very practical, everyday use. He invented spectacles.

These magnifying glasses are actually simple microscopes and our ancestors played with them for more than 2,OOO,years.

Then the glass was made into a simple instrument to concentrate the view of the object under observation: A lens was set into a simple glass tube. Next, two lenses were placed close together in the tube and the instrument mounted on a stand to keep it firm.

We do not know the inventor, but the instrument is called the simple microscope. Then, in 1590, a great advance was made by a father and son team   Zacharius and Hans Janssen. They placed a lens at each end of a tube and became the inventors of the compound microscope. One lens magnifies the object, the other lens magnifies the magnified image. The compound microscope is still being improved and adapted for special uses.

Other types of modern microscopes use ultra violet rays, ions or electrons instead of glass lenses. The wizard responsible for many of the new discoveries in medicine is the electron microscope which has advanced beyond the first magnifying glass about as far as the Friendship VII has advanced beyond a donkey cart. The miracle has developed bit by bit through thousands of years and most of the contributions hate been made by people unknown and forgotten.