Who Invented The First Microscope?

In the early time of the Romans, there were men who invented glass. These men used the glass for magnifying all different types of objects. They would polish the glass and cut it into different types of shapes in order to produce different types of results. After some time of inventing glass, the Romans began to use the magnifying glass to make what we call now a days, reading glasses. Pretty soon they figured out that they could use these lenses to magnify many objects as well as to bend light and magnify light from the sun to create heat.

Although the Romans did invent glass, they did not necessarily invent the microscope. In the years of the 1500’s there was a man named Zaccharias Janssen who was very much interested in magnifying glass. He was by trade a very talented spectacle creator. Zaccharias was the person who discovered that if he were to take two separate magnifying glasses and put them together that he could greatly increase the magnifying power of the glass. What Zaccharias did was he put the two magnifying glasses into a cylinder shaped tube object, similar to today’s most basic microscopes. When he put them into the tube and placed an object at the end of the tube, he could focus on that object and view it with great magnification. The name of this type of microscope is called a Compound Microscope. A compound microscope is a type of scope that utilizes two or more separate magnifying glasses that are put together to create an intensified magnifying effect.

After the invention of the microscope there was a great improvement made by a famous man in history. This man was Galileo, and he was a very big contributor in the development of the microscope. Although one of his more renowned achievements was the major improvements of the telescope, he also made great advances with the microscope. He added a device onto the microscope that allowed its users to not only magnify the object that they were viewing, but now they were able to adjust the focus of the object that they were observing through the microscope.

Another important figure in the development of the microscope was a man by the name of Anthony Leeuwenhoek. Anthony was a man who worked for a materials store and he was very impressed with magnifying lenses as he used them to view threads in the material that he worked with. He began to create the magnifying lenses himself by taking glass pieces and grinding them to certain curvatures and then polishing them out to create high intensity magnification. His lenses were able to magnify objects at approximately 250x. This was a huge achievement over the lenses that Zaccharias made which magnified at around 10x.

Despite all the improvements made to the microscope over time, it was Zaccharias who invented the microscope that is used today. Thanks to his actions the world has made many great discoveries that have saved countless lives around the world.

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