The History of Microscopes
On April 13, 1625, Galileo’s friend Giovanni Faber, wrote a letter to Prince Federico Angelo Cesi about this fascinating tool that could magnify small items. He referred to it as the “microscope” that is derived from the Greek words micron, which means small, and skopein, which means to look at. That same year, Cesi, along with scientist Francesco Stelluti published their work Apiarium. This body of work included their microscopic observations of three bees. It was the first published work that depicted microscopic observations of biological structures.
Though some people refer to COVID-19 as the invisible enemy, the virus is far from invisible. We know this because we have microscopic images of the virus, and we’ve seen the illustration of the virus as that fuzzy gray ball with red spikes. The illustration is a brilliant 3D rendering what it kind of looks like. The particular graphic that I’m referring to is the fuzzy gray ball with red spikes. It is an illustration and not what the virus actually looks like. This phenomenal article, written by Robert Britt, explains the components of the illustration and indicates how much more dangerous this virus is compared to other sars-related illnesses.
But in actuality, the virus doesn’t really look like a fuzzy gray ball with red spikes. It’s actually colorless. This excellent article in Wired Magazine shows an image of Luke Jerram’s viral crystal sculpture that represent viruses like Coronavirus. If you want to see more of Jerram’s gorgeous sculptures, his website is at https://www.lukejerram.com/
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, posted some of the first images to emerge of the virus. The images were captured with an electron microscope that scans and transmits the image.
After they obtained the image of COVID-19, microscopist Elizabeth Fisher produced the images. Then their Visual Medical Arts Department colorized the images. The coloring is there so that we can actually see them and understand what they look like.
THE HISTORY OF THE MICROSCOPE
As we all know, microscopes are made from glass. We have evidence from the Eastern Mesopotamian and Egyptian regions of some of the first man-made glass that dates back to 3500 BCE.
By 700 BCE, Assyrians wood manufacturing lenses that could be used as magnifying lenses. One was found in 1850 by Austin Henry Layard in modern-day Iraq in an area that was formerly called Nimrud. Today, you can see the Nimrud lens at the British Museum in London online.
Around 300 BCE Euclid wrote his work Optics, which covered the geometry of vision and began to set the groundwork for seeing things through glass. This body of work was further studied by many scientists thereafter. Commentaries were written by famed mathematicians and scientists Ptolemy, Theon (who was Hypatia’s father) and Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (also known as Alhazan).
By 500 BCE, glass was being manufactured and sold for profit. By the second century BCE, early scientists in China were using microscopes made of a lens and a water-filled tube.
In the 13th century, Rodger Bacon experimented with lenses and suggested that they could be used as eyeglasses. This contributed to the development of the microscope. Lenses at this point really only had a magnification between six and ten diameters.
In the 1590s, the microscope made significant progress. Zacharias Janssen and his son Hans, who made glasses, discovered that when they placed several lenses inside of an eighteen-inch tube, they could magnify an object. However, the magnification of the microscope was just nine diameters. Still, this was groundbreaking!
From this point forward, the developments came quickly. Galileo Galilei was able to use his telescope to see small objects up close. He then developed a compound microscope using a convex and a concave lens that he called the Occhiolino, which means “little eye.” However, Galileo’s invention was not actually considered a compound microscope because it had a concave lens.
In 1622, Cornelius Drebbel presented his invention of the microscope in Rome. It was the Keplerian microscope, which was also one of the first compound microscopes that held a convex objective AND a convex eyepiece. Here is where the story gets interesting. (It’s kind of like a Tesla and Marconi story.) In 1622, Drebbel, who lived in London, sent his son-in-law Giovanni Kuffler, off to sell the microscopes.
Kuffler first traveled to France, where he met Nicolas Peiresc and gave him a Keplerian microscope. Then Kuffler traveled to Rome, where he met the Cardinal of Santa Susana. He gave the Cardinal two Keplerians but never had the chance to explain to the Cardinal how they worked because Kuffler died while in Rome.
After Kuffler died, Peiresc sent his microscope off to the Cardinal along with a letter explaining how the Keplerian worked. In this letter, he described the items that he observed while using the microscope. However, for some reason, the Cardinal never received the package.
Then in 1624, Galileo had traveled to Rome to meet the Cardinal. While Galileo was in Rome, the Cardinal asked him for help trying to get the Keplerian microscope to work. Since Galileo had an idea as to how it worked, he was able to explain Drebbel’s invention to the Cardinal without any problem. In the process, Galileo discovered that Drebbel’s design used two convex lenses. And just like that, Galileo figured out how Drebbel’s invention worked!
So, a few months later, on September 23rd, 1624, Galileo sent a new Occhiolino to Prince Federico Cesi, Who was a polymath and founded a scientific Society known as the Accademia dei Lincei. Included with the Occhiolino wasa letter that described lenses and mentioned the efforts he took to grind them down to the correct curvatures. What is interesting about this letter is that it was almost verbatim to the same letter that Drebbel wrote to Peiresc in 1622![i]
So much like today’s deleted tweets that never go away, Drebbel’s letter resurfaced long after this to lead some historians to question who really invented the compound microscope!
Cesi knew he was on to something. On April 13, 1625, Galileo’s friend Giovanni Faber wrote a letter to Cesi about the fascinating tool that could magnify small items. In this letter, Faber referred to it as the “microscope,” which is derived from the Greek words micron, which means small and skopein, which means to look at. Hence, April 13 is the 395th birthday of the word microscope.
That same year, Cesi, along with scientist Francesco Stelluti published their work Apiarium, which included their microscopic observations of three bees. It was the first published work that depicted microscopic observations of biological structures. This was the beginning of 395 years of microscope development.
In 1665, English physicist Robert Hooke, using his microscope to look at tissue, coined the term “cells.”
Around 1674, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek (a Dutch scientist) emerged on to the scene with lenses that he created by grinding and polishing a glass ball into a lens. These magnifying lenses had 270 times the magnification. With his groundbreaking lenses, he was able to see and describe living cells, such as bacteria, blood cells, and yeast.
Then by 1846, Carl Zeiss was mass-producing these microscopes. However, his mass production really picked up when physicist Dr. Ernst Abbe became the research director at Zeiss Optical Works. While Abbe was at Zeiss, he created the Abbe sine condition, which is an optical formula. This formula presents the requirements that a lens needs to satisfy to form a sharp image, free from blurring. Abbe was the brains of this operation and set Zeiss up for success. As a result, Zeiss became the dominant microscope manufacturer of the nineteenth century.
In 1869, Mary Somerville published her work molecular and microscopic science. Then, in 1897, American cytologists and zoologists Katherine Foote and Ella Church Strobell, who worked as research Partners in the field, initiated the practice of photographing microscopic research samples. Additionally, they created a new technique of observing thin material samples in colder temperatures.
Finally, in the 20th century, in 1931, Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll designed and built the first Transmission Electron Microscope, otherwise known as the first TEM. The TEM required electrons, not light, to see an object.
The development of microscopes allowed us to see and analyze microscopic objects that we never thought possible. In 1932, Frits Zernike developed phase-contrast in illumination that allowed us to image transparent samples. He won the Nobel Prize for this in 1953.
In 1957, Marvin Minsky patented the confocal microscope, which uses a scanning pinhole of light to provide a higher resolution in scanned images.
In 1967, Erwin Wilhelm Muller created a microscope; it was an atom probe and was able to identify the chemical makeup of individual atoms.
In 1972, Godfrey Hounsfield and Allan Cormack developed the first Computerized Axial Tomography CAT scan.
By Timeholder — Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23203218
In 1981, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer developed the first Scanning-tunneling microscope.
Five years later, in 1986, Binnig, along with Calvin Quate and Christoph Gerber, invented the Atomic Force Microscope. This same year, Ruska, Binnig, and Rohrer jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
In 1988, Kingo Itaya invented the Electrochemical Scanning tunneling microscope.
In 1991, the Kelvin Probe Force microscope was invented.
In 2009, Dame Pratibha Gai made groundbreaking progress with her invention of the In situ Atomic resolution environmental transmission electron microscope, known as the ETEM. Her microscope allowed for observations of chemical reactions at an atomic scale. Gai decided not to patent her invention in order to further the advancement of science.
So, by 2010 researchers at UCLA using a cryo-electron microscope were able to see the atoms of a virus.
As of this month, Priyamvada Acharya and her team at Duke University are using their cryo-electron microscope called the Titan Krios to observe and determine the structures of the coronavirus spike protein, so that they can understand how the virus enters human cells. The Titan Krios transmission electron microscope gathers images to create a 2D and a 3D characterization of biological samples.
Now, in our current age, we have the ability to see when the virus enters a healthy cell! That’s the power of microscopes! That’s the power of science!
[i] Clara Sue Ball. “The Early History of the Compound Microscope.” Bios 37, no. 2 (1966): 51–60. Accessed April 12, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/4606667.