Birth of the optical microscopeIn around 1000 AD the first aid for vision was invented (the inventor is unknown), called a reading stone. It was described as a glass sphere that magnified the reading material when placed over an object. Someone took a piece of clear crystal, thick in the center rather than at the edges, looked at it, and noticed that it made objects appear larger. “Magnifying glasses” were mentioned in the 1st century AD by the Roman philosophers Seneca and Pliny the Elder, but were never used much until the invention of spectacles in the late 13th century. The first microscope was a simple tube with a plate at one end and a lens at the other, which magnified less than ten times its actual size. They were used to see fleas and small creepy things and were later nicknamed "flea glasses". Around 1284 the first wearable eyeglasses were invented and attributed to the Italian Salvino D'Amate. Around 1590, two Dutch eyeglass makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his son Hans, discovered while experimenting with tubes that objects appeared greatly magnified, which became the precursor to the compound microscope and telescope. In 1609, Galileo, the father of modern physics and astronomy, learned about these experiments and understood how lenses worked and made a better device with the ability to focus. Robert Hooke (1635 - 1703) Robert Hooke is considered one of the most neglected natural philosophers of all time. He is among other things the creator of the word "cell" in biology. The English physicist looked at a piece of silver cork through a microscope lens and noticed some “pores” or “cells” in it. He believed that cells served as containers for the “noble juices” or “fibrou…… half of paper……In this microscope electrons are accelerated in a vacuum until the wavelength is only one hundred thousandth that of white light . Beams of these fast-moving electrons are focused onto a sample of cell and are absorbed or scattered by parts of the cell to form an image on an electron-sensitive photographic plate. The electron microscope can magnify objects up to 1 million times. However, the electron microscope suffers from a serious setback, no living specimen can survive under its high vacuum and it cannot show the changing movements that characterize a living cell. References and quotes by Mary Bellis – inventors.about.com. accessed January 25, 2013 http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/microscope.htm http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/leeuwenhoek.html http://www.roberthooke.org .uk/http https://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/intro/histo.html