Timeline of microscope technology

• 1590 - Dutch spectacle-makers Hans Janssen and his son Zacharias Janssen, claimed by later writers (Pierre Borel 1620 - 1671 or 1628 - 1689 and Willem Boreel 1591 - 1668) to have invented a compound microscope.
• 1609 - Galileo Galilei develops an occhiolino or compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens.
• 1612 - Galileo presents occhiolino to Polish king Sigismund III.
• 1619 - Cornelius Drebbel (1572 - 1633) presents, in London, a compound microscope with two convex lenses.
• c.1622 - Drebbel presents his invention in Rome.
• 1624 - Galileo presents his occhiolino to Prince Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei (in English, The Linceans).
• 1625 - Giovanni Faber of Bamberg (1574 - 1629) of the Linceans coins the word microscope by analogy with telescope.
• 1665 - Robert Hooke publishes Micrographia, a collection of biological micrographs. He coins the word cell for the structures he discovers in cork bark.
• 1674 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek improves on a simple microscope for viewing biological specimens.
• 1931 - Ernst Ruska starts to build the first electron microscope. It is a Transmission electron microscope (TEM)
• 1936 - Erwin Müller invents the field emission microscope.
• 1938 - James Hillier builds another TEM
• 1951 - Erwin Müller invents the field ion microscope and is the first to see atoms.
• 1953 - Frits Zernike, professor of theoretical physics, receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the phase contrast microscope.
• 1967 - Erwin Müller adds time-of-flight spectroscopy to the field ion microscope, making the first atom probe and allowing the chemical identification of each individual atom.
• 1981 - Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer develop the scanning tunneling microscope.
• 1986 - Gerd Binnig, Quate, and Gerber invent the Atomic force microscope
• 1988 - Alfred Cerezo, Terence Godfrey, and George Smith applied a position-sensitive detector to the atom probe, making it able to resolve atoms in 3-dimensions.
• 1988 - Kingo Itaya invents the Electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope
• 1991 - Kelvin probe force microscope invented

Technology timelines | Microscopy | Cronología del desarrollo del microscopio