50 Fun Facts About Microscopes

What is a microscope used to examine?

The most common type, and the first invented, is the optical microscope, which uses lenses to refract visible light.

Around what year did the earliest known compound microscopes appear in Europe?

The inventor is unknown; competing claims centre on the spectacle-making towns of the Netherlands.

Which Dutch spectacle-maker is claimed, by his own son, to have invented the compound microscope in 1590?

He was twice accused of counterfeiting coins, and the claim was made twenty years after his death.

In which Dutch town did the Janssen spectacle-makers live next door to the first man to seek a telescope patent?

Lippershey applied for the first telescope patent in 1608 and is also credited by some with the microscope.

What name did Galileo give to the compound microscope he built, before 'microscopio' was coined?

Giovanni Faber coined 'microscopio' in a letter to Federico Cesi after Galileo submitted the instrument to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1625.

Whose 1665 book Micrographia had a huge impact largely because of its impressive illustrations?

He made his tiny lenses from glass globules formed by fusing the ends of threads of spun glass.

Which biological term did Micrographia originate?

Hooke coined it because walled plant cells in cork reminded him of the cells of a monastery.

The most famous fold-out plate in Micrographia, four times the size of the book, depicts what?

Samuel Pepys called it 'the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life'.

Micrographia was the first major publication of which institution?

It became the first scientific best-seller and inspired wide public interest in microscopy.

Which Dutch draper and self-taught scientist is known as 'the Father of Microbiology'?

He ran a cloth shop in Delft and took up lens-making to inspect thread more closely.

What did van Leeuwenhoek report to London's scientific society on 9 October 1676?

He called them 'animalcules' and found them everywhere, including on his own teeth.

How was van Leeuwenhoek's microscope constructed?

A screw-adjusted needle held the specimen; the surviving examples magnify up to 275 times.

In what language did van Leeuwenhoek write all of his roughly 190 letters to London's scientific society?

Henry Oldenburg learned Dutch specifically to translate them; he never published a proper paper in Latin.

As of 2025, how many of van Leeuwenhoek's single-lens microscopes were known to survive?

He made at least 25 of them and more than 500 lenses; some may have magnified up to 500 times.

Which Delft painter, baptised four days before him, had van Leeuwenhoek as the executor of his will?

Some have suggested he is the model for Vermeer's The Astronomer and The Geographer.

Which visiting monarch did van Leeuwenhoek present with an 'eel-viewer' in 1697 to study blood circulation?

The Tsar's boat was moored near Delft; other visitors over the years included Leibniz and John Locke.

Which Italian 'father of histology' began his microscopic studies with the lungs in the 1660s?

He observed capillaries in frog lungs in 1661, completing the circuit Harvey had predicted.

Who wrote The Fly's Eye (1644), the first detailed microscopic account of organic tissue?

Its Italian title was L'occhio della mosca; the microscope remained largely a novelty until the 1660s.

On a compound microscope, what is the lens closest to the eye called?

Also called the ocular, it is a cylinder of two or more lenses that brings the image into focus for the eye.

A 10x ocular combined with a 100x objective gives what total magnification?

Total magnification is the product of the two; oil immersion or ultraviolet light is needed to resolve detail beyond that.

Diffraction limits ordinary light microscopes to roughly what resolving distance?

Higher magnifications are possible but reveal no more detail; electron microscopes reach about 0.1 nm.

What is placed between objective and cover slip to push numerical aperture as high as 1.6?

Numerical apertures as high as 1.6 become possible, and such lenses usually magnify 40 to 100 times.

Which German optical engineer, partner of Carl Zeiss, was the first to define 'numerical aperture'?

He also introduced the eight-hour working day at Zeiss in 1900 in memory of his father's 14-hour days.

Who developed the still-standard 1893 microscope illumination method that keeps the lamp filament out of the image?

Before it, the image of the light source was always visible superimposed on the specimen.

Which Dutch physicist won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing phase-contrast illumination?

It lets transparent samples such as live cells be imaged without staining, by using interference rather than absorption.

Who patented the principle of the confocal microscope in 1957?

Better known as an AI pioneer, he was ahead of the lasers needed to make it practical; the first working laser-scanning version came in 1978.

Which fluorescent stain is commonly used to label DNA in cells?

Fluorescence microscopy also relies on antibodies tagged with fluorescent reporters and on fluorescent proteins such as GFP.

Which German physicist, with engineer Max Knoll, built the first prototype electron microscope in 1931?

He waited until 1986 for his Nobel Prize, sharing it with the inventors of the scanning tunneling microscope.

What does an electron microscope use in place of the glass lenses of a light microscope?

Ruska showed in 1931 that a magnetic coil could act as a lens for electrons.

Roughly what resolution can electron microscopes achieve, compared with 200 nm for light microscopes?

An electron's wavelength can be more than 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light.

Why must samples in an electron microscope usually be viewed in a vacuum?

Environmental scanning electron microscopes are the exception, allowing hydrated samples to be imaged.

Which company produced the first commercial transmission electron microscope, in 1939?

Ernst Ruska's brother Helmut, a doctor, was employed there to develop biological applications.

Who pioneered the scanning electron microscope in 1937?

The SEM was not commercially available until 1965, when Cambridge Instrument Company launched the 'Stereoscan'.

What was the first commercial scanning electron microscope, marketed in 1965, called?

It was developed by Sir Charles Oatley and his postgraduate student Gary Stewart.

Which two IBM Zürich researchers invented the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981?

They shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ruska.

A scanning tunneling microscope senses a surface using what?

Electrons tunnel between tip and sample so close together that individual atoms can be imaged and even moved.

IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move atoms of which element on nickel?

The same trick has been used to build 'quantum corrals' and watch electron waves ripple inside them.

The atomic force microscope, invented in 1986, was described by Binnig, Quate and whom?

True atomic resolution in liquid was not demonstrated until 1993.

In an atomic force microscope, the sharp tip is fixed to the free end of what?

A detector records the cantilever's deflection as the tip is scanned across the surface.

Which three scientists shared the 2014 Chemistry Nobel for super-resolved microscopy?

The prize citation said their work brought optical microscopy 'into the nanodimension'.

What does the super-resolution technique STED stand for?

Stefan Hell developed it; structured illumination, by contrast, improves resolution only two to four times.

Who filed the first telescope patent in 1608 and is sometimes credited with the microscope?

He was Janssen's neighbour and rival in the Middelburg spectacle trade.

Which Dutch inventor's 1624 Rome microscope prompted Galileo to build an improved one?

Drebbel had been showing a version in London as early as 1619.

What did the author of Micrographia observe in cork bark that led him to coin his famous term?

The 1665 observation appears in Micrographia alongside studies of the fly's eye, fossils and the wave theory of light.

In which year did Binnig and Rohrer win the Physics Nobel for the scanning tunneling microscope?

They had built the instrument at IBM Zürich only five years earlier, an unusually fast turnaround for the Nobel committee.

How was the very first scanning tunneling microscope isolated from vibration?

Because tunneling current is exquisitely sensitive to tip-sample distance, modern STMs use mechanical or gas springs and eddy-current damping instead.

In which year did Ruska and Knoll first build an electron microscope that beat light microscopes?

Their 1931 prototype came first; Siemens then produced the first commercial electron microscope in 1938.

Where did Eli Franklin Burton and his students build an early North American electron microscope?

Students Cecil Hall, James Hillier and Albert Prebus worked on it in the 1930s; another early machine was built at Washington State.

Who introduced the scanning transmission electron microscope with a field emission source in 1965?

Crewe worked at the University of Chicago; field emission guns became common in electron microscopes during the 1980s.

The earliest known use of simple microscopes dates to the spread of what in the 13th century?

Lens-like objects go back 4,000 years and Greek writers described water-filled spheres, but the magnifying glass proper rode on the spectacle trade.