The Yorkshire scientist Henry Power was the first to publish observations made with a microscope, and in 1661 Marcello Malphigi used a microscope to provide clinching evidence in support of Harvey's theory of blood circulation when he discovered the capillary vessels in the lungs of a frog.
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The microscope is handheld and can be focused by sliding the draw tube in or out while observing the sample, and is capable of magnifying images up to ten times their original size when extended to the maximum.Īs ingenious as the Janssen invention was, it would be more than half a century before the instrument found widespread use among scientists. The design is somewhat different, consisting of three tubes, two of which are draw tubes that can slide into the third, which acts as an outer casing. No early models of Janssen microscopes have survived, but a Middleburg museum has a microscope dated from 1595, bearing the Janssen name. The main tube was an inch or two in diameter and contained an ebony disk at its base, with a concave lens at one end and a convex lens at the other the combination of lenses enabled the instrument to bend light and enlarge images between three and nine times the size of the original specimen. He described a device that rose vertically from a brass tripod almost two and a half feet long. Historians are able to date the invention to the early 1590s thanks to Dutch diplomat William Boreel, a longtime family friend of the Janssens who wrote a letter to the French king in the 1650s detailing the origins of the microscope. In fact, some historians credit both the Janssens and a fellow Dutch eyeglass maker, Hans Lippershey, with concurrent, though independent, invention of the microscope.
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At that time, eyeglasses were beginning to be used widely among the populace, focusing a great deal of attention on optics and lenses. Janssen was the son of a spectacle maker named Hans Janssen, in Middleburg, Holland, and while Zacharias is credited with inventing the compound microscope, most historians surmise that his father must have played a vital role, since Zacharias was still in his teens in the 1590s. While extremely rough in image quality and magnification compared to modern versions, the Janssen microscope was nonetheless a seminal advance in scientific instrumentation. Lens Crafters Circa 1590: Invention of the MicroscopeĮvery major field of science has benefited from the use of some form of microscope, an invention that dates back to the late 16th century and a modest Dutch eyeglass maker named Zacharias Janssen.