,
Paris Although objects resembling lenses date back 4,000 years and there are
Greek accounts of the optical properties of water-filled spheres (5th century BC) followed by many centuries of writings on optics, the earliest known use of simple microscopes (
magnifying glasses) dates back to the widespread use of lenses in
eyeglasses in the 13th century. The earliest known examples of compound microscopes, which combine an
objective lens near the specimen with an
eyepiece to view a
real image, appeared in Europe around 1620. The inventor is unknown, even though many claims have been made over the years. Several revolve around the spectacle-making centers in the
Netherlands, including claims it was invented in 1590 by
Zacharias Janssen (claim made by his son) or Zacharias' father, Hans Martens, or both, claims it was invented by their neighbor and rival spectacle maker,
Hans Lippershey (who applied for the first
telescope patent in 1608), and claims it was invented by
expatriate Cornelis Drebbel, who was noted to have a version in London in 1619.
Galileo Galilei (also sometimes cited as compound microscope inventor) seems to have found after 1610 that he could close focus his telescope to view small objects and, after seeing a compound microscope built by Drebbel exhibited in Rome in 1624, built his own improved version.
Giovanni Faber coined the name
microscope for the compound microscope Galileo submitted to the in 1625 (Galileo had called it the
occhiolino 'little eye').
René Descartes (
Dioptrique, 1637) describes microscopes wherein a concave mirror, with its concavity towards the object, is used, in conjunction with a lens, for illuminating the object, which is mounted on a point fixing it at the focus of the mirror.
Rise of modern light microscopes in the 1860s, held in the collection of the
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum The first detailed account of the
microscopic anatomy of organic tissue based on the use of a microscope did not appear until 1644, in Giambattista Odierna's ''L'occhio della mosca
, or The Fly's Eye''. The microscope was still largely a novelty until the 1660s and 1670s when naturalists in Italy, the Netherlands and England began using them to study biology. Italian scientist
Marcello Malpighi, called the father of
histology by some historians of biology, began his analysis of biological structures with the lungs. The publication in 1665 of
Robert Hooke's
Micrographia had a huge impact, largely because of its impressive illustrations. Hooke created tiny lenses of small glass globules made by fusing the ends of threads of spun glass. Then, Van Leeuwenhoek re-discovered
red blood cells (after
Jan Swammerdam) and
spermatozoa, and helped popularise the use of microscopes to view biological ultrastructure. On 9 October 1676, van Leeuwenhoek reported the discovery of micro-organisms. The performance of a compound light microscope depends on the quality and correct use of the
condensor lens system to focus light on the specimen and the objective lens to capture the light from the specimen and form an image. Although TEMs were being used for research before WWII, and became popular afterwards, the SEM was not commercially available until 1965. Transmission electron microscopes became popular following the
Second World War. Ernst Ruska, working at
Siemens, developed the first commercial transmission electron microscope and, in the 1950s, major scientific conferences on electron microscopy started being held. In 1965, the first commercial scanning electron microscope was developed by Professor Sir
Charles Oatley and his postgraduate student Gary Stewart, and marketed by the
Cambridge Instrument Company as the "Stereoscan". One of the latest discoveries made about using an electron microscope is the ability to identify a virus. Since this microscope produces a visible, clear image of small organelles, in an electron microscope there is no need for reagents to see the virus or harmful cells, resulting in a more efficient way to detect pathogens.
Scanning probe microscopes From 1981 to 1983
Gerd Binnig and
Heinrich Rohrer worked at
IBM in
Zürich, Switzerland to study the
quantum tunnelling phenomenon. They created a practical instrument, a
scanning probe microscope from quantum tunnelling theory, that read very small forces exchanged between a probe and the surface of a sample. The probe approaches the surface so closely that electrons can flow continuously between probe and sample, making a current from surface to probe. The microscope was not initially well received due to the complex nature of the underlying theoretical explanations. In 1984
Jerry Tersoff and D.R. Hamann, while at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in
Murray Hill, New Jersey began publishing articles that tied theory to the experimental results obtained by the instrument. This was closely followed in 1985 with functioning commercial instruments, and in 1986 with Gerd Binnig, Quate, and Gerber's invention of the
atomic force microscope, then Binnig's and Rohrer's Nobel Prize in Physics for the SPM. New types of scanning probe microscope have continued to be developed as the ability to machine ultra-fine probes and tips has advanced.
Fluorescence microscopes The most recent developments in light microscope largely centre on the rise of
fluorescence microscopy in
biology. This occurs because the diffraction limit is occurred from light or excitation, which makes the resolution must be doubled to become super saturated. Stefan Hell was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of the STED technique, along with Eric Betzig and William Moerner who adapted fluorescence microscopy for single-molecule visualization.
X-ray microscopes X-ray microscopes are instruments that use electromagnetic radiation usually in the soft X-ray band to image objects. Technological advances in X-ray lens optics in the early 1970s made the instrument a viable imaging choice. They are often used in tomography (see
micro-computed tomography) to produce three dimensional images of objects, including biological materials that have not been chemically fixed. Currently research is being done to improve optics for hard X-rays which have greater penetrating power. ==Types==