Galileo called his microscope a little eye before a friend renamed it
When Galileo presented a compound microscope to Rome's Accademia dei Lincei in 1625, he called it the occhiolino, or little eye. His fellow academician Giovanni Faber came up with microscopio instead. Nobody knows for sure who built the first one, though several Dutch spectacle makers have been credited.
Magnifying glasses came into wide use alongside spectacles in the 13th century, but compound microscopes, pairing a lens near the specimen with an eyepiece, first appear in Europe around 1620. Claims cluster around the Netherlands: that Zacharias Janssen or his father built one in 1590, according to Janssen's son; that their rival Hans Lippershey, who sought the first telescope patent in 1608, did; or that the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel, who had one in London by 1619, deserves credit. Galileo found after 1610 that his telescope could focus on small things, and after seeing a Drebbel instrument in Rome in 1624 he built a better one.
The first detailed study of tissue under a microscope was Giambattista Odierna's The Fly's Eye of 1644. For decades the instrument remained a curiosity, until naturalists in Italy, the Netherlands and England took it up in the 1660s and 1670s. Marcello Malpighi began his anatomical work with the lungs. Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665, with its striking illustrations, caused a sensation; he made tiny lenses by melting the ends of spun glass threads.
The Dutch draper Antonie van Leeuwenhoek did even better with a single lens: a minute glass bead clamped between two riveted metal plates, with a screw-adjusted needle to hold the specimen, magnifying up to 300 times. He observed sperm cells, independently spotted red blood cells, and on 9 October 1676 reported discovering micro-organisms.
Getting the best from compound microscopes required understanding illumination. August Köhler's 1893 method gave even lighting that let instruments approach their theoretical resolution. Frits Zernike's phase contrast and Georges Nomarski's differential interference contrast, from the 1950s, made it possible to see transparent, unstained samples. Today microscopes also use electrons, fluorescence or scanning probes.
Source: Microscope
