Who Invented The Microscope?
Zacharias Janssen, probably with some help from his father, made the first microscope in the world around 1595. He was a Dutch who dealt in optical equipments. The first microscopes made by Zacharias Janssen or Sacharias Janssen, as the Dutch spell the name, were tube-like structures with magnifying powers ranging from 3X to 9X. Microscopes, which employ optical glasses to magnify objects, are known as optical microscopes. They are easy to manufacture and they are relatively inexpensive. The problem with them is the upper limit of magnification i.e. they cannot magnify objects beyond a limit. The upper limit for an optical microscope is 1000X.
Ernst August Friedrich Ruska, a German physicist and a Nobel Prize winning scientist, created a better device in 1931 which is known as an ‘electron microscope’. The first device was a prototype but within two years, the electron microscope surpassed the optical microscope in optical resolution. The electron microscopes further have subtypes depending upon their working. Electron microscopes can have optical resolutions reaching 1,000,000X.
The primary difference between optical microscopes and electron microscopes is the way they function. An optical microscope uses natural light and lenses arranged in a definite order to magnify things. An electron microscope, on the other hand, uses a beam of photons to make small things visible to us. Electron microscopes are much more complex and expensive.
There are also microscopes which use sound waves to read a surface. They are called Scanning Acoustic Microscopes and the first SAM was made by R. A. Lemons and C. F. Quate of the Microwave Laboratory, Stanford University, in 1974.
Category: Inventions