It's the very symbol of scientific endeavor used by researchers in most every field
whether you study elephants or nanobots. If you do science you probably need to study the very small
before you can get to the big picture.
For more than four hundred years, we've been able to do this thanks to the optical, or light microscope,
an ingeniously simple device without which we would not have found a cure for polio,
or been able to make microchips, or discover some of the fundamental properties of light itself.
And it made it all possible using the same basic technology for hundreds of years
Of course if you want to start a full-on "Petri dish throw
and roll up your lab coat sleeves" science fight,
all you have to do is raise the question of who really invented the microscope.
Some like to attribute it to the guys who pioneered the telescope,
like Galileo and Hans Lippershey, both of whom tinkered with using lenses
to get a closer look at things here on Earth,
but many give credit to the Dutch Father-And-Son team of Hans and Zacharias Johnson.
In the late 1500s they were making their living as eyeglass lens grinders, at a time when eyeglasses
were, like, the Google Glass of the day.
It was cutting-edge stuff, and everyone wanted it. Especially the people who couldn't see.
But the Onsens wondered what would happen if you took a telescope, like Galileo's,
which had a really big concave lens on one end to gather light, and a convex lens on the other to magnify it,
and instead used two very small, almost spherical, convex lenses.
They found that their device could magnify objects up to nine times,
and it had a short focal length, meaning it could bring images into focus over a short distance
This was pretty handy for their extremely nearsighted customers,
but their contraption's usefulness for scientific research seemed to have largely escaped them,
It was seventy years later when English philosopher Robert Hooke tricked out the Onsens design
and used his own version to study the natural world.
he scrutinized the structure of feathers, the eyes of house flies, and perhaps most famously,
thin slices of cork.
The tiny compartments that he saw, and the woody tissue, reminded him of monk's chambers
and he named this essential unit of life after them: cells.
but then, scoring another win for Team Netherlands, Dutch Polymath Antony van Leeuwenhoek
soon designed his own handheld microscope, with new special lenses
that could magnify objects up to 270 times.
And suddenly, a whole new world was opened up to human eyes, for the first time.
Leeuwenhoek discovered organisms that no one had any idea even existed,
like bacteria found swimming in rainwater and human saliva,
which he called "Animalcules".
He also observed microscopic nematode worms, tiny waterborne rotifers,
and was the first to observe human cells, like red blood cells, and sperm.
Our understanding of the world around us would never be the same, and with each new generation,
the microscope took on new modifications to make it sharper, more stable, and more powerful.
By the late 1800s we arrived at a version pretty similar to what you know today,
with a stage for holding your specimen, a light source (usually underneath),
followed by objective lenses that collect and focus the light coming through the specimen
and an ocular lens, or eyepiece, that magnifies the image.
This simple setup in the window onto the world that it opened got to be
so essential to scientific pursuit that microscopy soon became a kind of science of its own.
And any discovery that cracked that window open just a little wider got you a Nobel Prize.
Like in 1926, Austrian chemist Richard Zsigmondy broke the code of how to study
particles smaller than a wavelength of visible light by inventing the Ultra microscope,
which aimed a high-powered light beam at an angle through a colloid of particles.
Nearly 30 Years later Frits Zernike won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing
the phase-contrast microscope, which finally made possible the study of
colorless and transparent materials.
And we're not even talking about the whole new wave of technologies that the optical microscope inspired,
like the Electron Microscope, which uses beams of electrons instead of light
to magnify images up to 10 million times.
Or, the scanning tunneling microscope, which can resolve surfaces down to the atomic Level
Science is amazing and much of it is made possible by revealing what once had been invisible,
and we'd like to thank subbable subscriber Labverse, which aims to let people explore the invisible world
via a remote Web-Based Microscope, for choosing this topic.
If you'd like to choose a topic for a Scishow episode, or sponsor a graphic,
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