How Microscopes Changed Lives: The History of Ordinary Things
In ancient times sickness was terrifying because it was unpredictable and often deadly. Myths from the devil to God and beyond evolved to explain diseases.
The compound microscope created in the 1600s was key to finding answers. But how did that develop? 4000 years ago in the Chow-Foo dynasty, the Chinese magnified specimens through a glass lens at the end of a tube. The tube was filled with varying levels of water to achieve levels of magnification.
In ~300 BC Aristotle described the use of curved lenses to magnify. Grinding glass for spectacles was common during the 1300s. By the late 1500s Dutch lens makers were designing handheld devices that magnified objects. The Dutch father/son team, Hans and Zacharias Janssen, discovered that if they put a glass lens at the top and bottom of a tube, small objects were enlarged. They had created the design for the “compound” microscope. It magnified by 20 to 30 times with poor quality image.
Improvements in image quality and magnifying power allowed Robert Hooke, an English natural scientist, to view and draw hundreds of pictures of specimens which he published in a book Micrographia in 1665. He called the small individual sections of plants “cells.” He is known as the father of cellular biology.
In 1676, a Dutch merchant, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, ground his own lenses and made simple microscopes with magnification of up to 200 times. He began to study animal and plant tissue, sperm, and blood cells.
Inadvertently, he discovered bacteria which opened the field of microbiology. Leeuwenhoek is considered the founder of the study of microscopy. He played a vital role in the development of cell theory.
French scientist Louis Pasteur, nearly 200 years later, discovered that bacteria were the cause behind many illnesses.
The basic structure of two lenses connected by a tube was used for centuries. During the 18th and 19th centuries there were changes in both the housing design and the quality of microscopes. They became more stable and smaller with lens improvements.
In 1931, a pair of German scientists invented the electron microscope. Examining a cell sample, it shoots speeded up electrons versus photons of light. As the electrons are absorbed or scattered by different parts of the cell, they form an image that is captured by an electron-sensitive photo plate. The modern electron microscopes can magnify up to 2 million times.
In the 1980s IBM introduced the scanning probe microscope that creates a high-resolution image at the level of the atom. In 2014, a team of German and American researchers produced the super-resolution fluorescence microscope. It can track single proteins as they develop within cells thus allowing scientists to view mutations, or different strains, of viruses as they are evolving.
The microscope allowed human beings to view and name the “agents” that make up our world, and specifically those things that cause disease. In time these “agents” of sickness were tamed and named, prevented and someday perhaps, eradicated.
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