Historical milestones of microscopy
- 1267 – Roger Bacon explains the principles of the lens and proposes the idea of telescope and microscope.2
- 1590 – Dutch show editors Hans Jansen and his son Zacharias Jansen are considered to have invented a compound microscope.
- 1609 – Galileo Galilei develops in Italy an “occhiolino” or compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens.
- 1612 – Galileo presents the occhiolino to the King of Poland Sigismund III.
- 1619 – Cornelius Drebbel (1572–1633) presents in London a compound microscope with two convex lenses. In 1622 he presented his invention in Rome.
- 1625 – Giovanni Faber of Bamberg (1574-1629) coined the word microscope by analogy with a telescope.
- 1665 – Robert Hooke publishes Micrographia, a collection of biological micrographs, and coins the word cell for the structures of a cork bark.
- 1674 – Anton van Leeuwenhoek polishes glasses and invents the simple microscope. He visualizes protozoa for the first time and describes bacteria.
- 1863 – Henry Clifton Sorby develops a metallurgical or petrographic microscope to observe the structure of meteorites.
- 1860 – Ernst Abbe discovers Abbe’s breast relationship, a breakthrough in lens design, which until then was largely based on trial and error.
- 1881 – Retzius describes a large number of animal tissues in detail that has not been surpassed by any other light microscopist. Ramon y Cajal develops new staining methods and establishes the foundations of microscopic anatomy.
- 1886 – Carl Zeiss manufactures a series of lenses, designed by Abbé, that allow the microscopist to resolve structures at the theoretical limits of visible light.