Compound microscope
Microscopio compuesto
- Date
- c. 1590-1625 · confidence low
- Place
- Middelburg, Netherlands / Rome (Galileo, 1624)
- Credited to
- Zacharias Janssen or Hans Lippershey (tradition); Cornelis Drebbel (1620); Galileo (occhialino, 1624)
- People
- 👤 Cornelius Drebbel1572–1633👤 Galileo Galilei1564–1642
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
An instrument of two or more lenses that magnified small objects; Faber coined the name in 1625, and Hooke popularised it with Micrographia (1665), in which he described the cell. It opened the world of the minuscule to science.
The attribution to Janssen (c. 1590) rests on an unreliable 1655 testimony; Drebbel presented a microscope in London in 1620, and Galileo adapted his telescope. There is no single clear inventor.
What it led to
- Hooke's Micrographia and the term 'cell'
- Microscopic anatomy (Malpighi, Swammerdam)
- Scientific illustration of the invisible and a culture of curiosity
Built on
- Concave spectacles for myopiac. 1450
- Refracting telescope1608
- Spectacle lenses
Made possible
- Discovery of the red blood cell1658
- The cell (Hooke's Micrographia)1665
- Leeuwenhoek single-lens microscopec. 1670-1674
- Lister's achromatic microscope objective1830
- Malaria parasite (Plasmodium)1880
- Leeuwenhoek's microscope
- Achromatic microscope (19th century)
- Histology