Microscope
McKenzie Pallischeck
What is a Microscope?
A Microscope is an instrument that makes it so you can see images that are too small for the eye to see without any sort of help. It uses lenses to enlarge and enhance something that is placed underneath the lens. It is usually used in the science field.
Original Inventor
The "original" microscope hadn't been named at the time, but when glass was first made in the year 100, Romans tested different types of glass. They discovered that if you hold a piece of glass over an object, it appears larger. These lenses were known as magnifiers, or burning glass.
Reinvented During the Renaissance
During the Renaissance, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans, experimented with the magnifier glass idea and put the lenses in tubes. They realized that by doing this, the object at the other end of the tube would be a lot larger than any simple magnifying glass could make it. These are known as compound microscopes. This was sometime during the 1590's.
The compound microscope was a tube that had a hole at the top and the bottom. There would be at least two lenses, one at the top and one at the bottom. Putting more than one lens is important, because if you have two or more, you are increasing how large the object you are looking at gets.
Microscopes Through Time
Microscopes have involved a lot since the 1500's. They pictures are larger and clearer. There is one type of microscope that has millions of tiny lenses that rotate around to create the clearest image it can. These microscopes are used to look at even smaller things that the ones during the renaissance. Modern microscopes are used to look at specific parts of bacteria and cells.