Zacharias janssen biography microscope slides
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The Microscope
The development of the microscope allowed scientists to make new insights into the body and disease.
It’s not clear who invented the first microscope, but the Dutch spectacle maker Zacharias Janssen (b.1585) is credited with making one of the earliest compound microscopes (ones that used two lenses) around 1600. The earliest microscopes could magnify an object up to 20 or 30 times its normal size.
In the 1660s, another Dutchman, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) made microscopes by grinding his own lenses. His simple microscopes were more like magnifying glasses, with only one lens.
But the high-quality, hand-ground lenses could magnify an object by up to 200 times.
Leeuwenhoek observed animal and plant tissue, human sperm and blood cells, minerals, fossils, and many other things that had never been seen before on a microscopic scale.
He presented his findings to the Royal Society in London, where Robert Hooke was also making remarkabl
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Zacharias Janssen is generally believed to be the first investigator to invent the compound microscope. However, because the accomplishment is generally agreed among historians to be dated in the 1590s, most scholars believe that his father, Hans, must have played an important role in the creation of the instrument. The pair worked together as spectacle makers in Middleburg, Holland not far from Hans Lippershey, another optical scientist who is often alternatively credited with the invention of the microscope.
The Dutch diplomat William Boreel was a longtime acquaintance of Zacharias Janssen, who had written to him about the device in letters. Boreel saw the microscope for himself, but only years later when it had already fallen into the hands of another family friend, Cornelius Drebbel. When the physician of the French King publicly sought information regarding the origin of the microscope during the 1650s, Boreel responded, relating information about the Janssens and recounting
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