Through a Microscope

Through a Microscope

Barely Visible A human hair is one of the smallest things the human eye can see. Imagine, though, if you could shrink yourself until that hair looked as thick as your arm. What would you see? The hairs on a fly's legs would look like huge spikes. The fly would look like a monster with giant eyes! That's the close-up view a microscope allows.

The First Simple Microscopes For thousands of years, people have wanted to take a closer look at their world. The ancient Greeks used glass balls filled with water to make objects look larger. The Romans discovered that glass that was thick in the middle and thin on the edges made things look bigger. This was the first magnifying glass. People learned how to make better glass lenses in Europe in the 1600s. With that discovery, the microscope was invented. At first, the microscope was just a sort of fancy magnifying glass. Most magnifying glasses only make things look about five to ten times larger in size. That was the power of the first simple microscopes.

Compound Microscopes Early microscope users found that they could put two magnifying glasses in a row. The second lens magnified the image from the first lens. This made the image look even bigger. With the two lenses working together in a single microscope, the compound microscope was born. Today, compound microscopes can make objects look up to fifteen hundred times (1, 500x) bigger!

Magnified Twenty to Thirty Times(20-30x) One of the early microscope users was Robert Hooke. Hooke was one of the first people to take careful notes on what he saw through a microscope. He published his notes in a book filled with drawings. Hooke's book had close-up views of a louse and a flea. He drew the eyes of a fly in greater detail than anyone had ever seen before. Hooke also sketched parts of plants and seeds. When he looked at a piece of cork under a microscope, he discovered that it was made of tiny chambers. He called those chambers " cells. " Over time, the word cell came to be used for the tiny building blocks of all living things.

Magnified Fifty to Two Hundred Times(50-200x) Historians believe that Hooke's book inspired another early microscope user, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (LEY-vun-hook). Van Leeuwenhoek was a cloth merchant, not a trained scientist. However, he used magnifying glasses to take a close look at the fabric he bought and sold. After he saw Hooke's drawings, Van Leeuwenhoek started making lenses of his own.