Microscope

A microscope is a word that has been derived from the Greek language. It is a gadget that is used to view the objects that are too small to be seen by naked eyes. Microscopy is the science for investigating such small living objects. Microscope is the basic tool through which students of microscopy are introduced.

The science of investigating small objects using such an instrument is called microscopy, and the term microscopic means minute or very small, not easily visible with the unaided eye. In other words, requiring a microscope to examine. Microscopes give us a large image of a tiny object. The microscopes we use in school and at home trace their history back almost 400 years.

The first microscope was created in the Netherlands around the 1600s. There is almost as much confusion about the inventor as about the dates. Three different eyeglass makers have been given credit for the invention. The possible inventors are Hans Lippershey (who also developed the first real telescope), Hans Janssen, and his son, Zacharias.

Lens quality in early microscopes was often poor so the images were not very clear. But even these rather crude microscopes were a great help in learning more about animals and plants.

The most common type of microscope—and the first to be invented—is the optical microscope. This is an optical instrument containing one or more lenses that produce an enlarged image of an object placed in the focal plane of the lens(es). There are, however, many other microscope designs.

During that historic period known as the Renaissance, after the "dark" Middle Ages, there occurred the inventions of printing, gunpowder and the mariner's compass, followed by the discovery of America. Equally remarkable was the invention of the light microscope: an instrument that enables the human eye, by means of a lens or combinations of lenses, to observe enlarged images of tiny objects. It made visible the fascinating details of worlds within worlds.

Invention Of Glass Lenses

Long before, in the hazy unrecorded past, someone picked up a piece of transparent crystal thicker in the middle than at the edges, looked through it, and discovered that it made things look larger.

Someone also found that such a crystal would focus the sun's rays and set fire to a piece of parchment or cloth. Magnifiers and "burning glasses" or "magnifying glasses" are mentioned in the writings of Seneca and Pliny the Elder, Roman philosophers during the first century A. D., but apparently they were not used much until the invention of spectacles, toward the end of the 13th century. They were named lenses because they are shaped like the seeds of a lentil.

The earliest simple microscope was merely a tube with a plate for the object at one end and, at the other, a lens which gave a magnification less than ten diameters -- ten times the actual size. These excited general wonder when used to view fleas or tiny creeping things and so were dubbed "flea glasses."