Who invented compound microscope?

Compound microscope was invented in 17^th century. As to who invented the compound microscope is a question of controversy. There are three persons who claim to have invented it; Hans Lippershey, Zacharias and Hans Jansen and Giovanni Faber. The microscope was originally invented by Galileo who called it “Little Eye” but Giovanni Faber renamed it as “microscope”. Microscope was rather discovered than invented. While using different lenses at different combinations the nearby objects appeared enlarged. The first microscope was just a tube with lenses at both the ends. This was invented by Jansen’s.

In the mid 17^th century there were tremendous changes made in this field by Robert Hooke and Anton van. Robert studied microscope carefully and brought its results to public in the form of Micrographia. Anton took microscope to the attention of the biologists.

Different people kept on working on the concept. Joseph Jackson Lister solved the problem of blurred images with spherical aberration in the year 1830. In 1878’ Ernst Abbes concocted theory relating wavelength of light to resolution. Ultra microscope was invented by Richard Zsigmondy in 1903 won the Nobel Prize for the same. For the study of transparent and colorless organic material phase- contrast microscope was invented in 1932 by Frits Zernike. In 1938 electron microscope was promoted by Ernst Ruska. In 1981, scanning tunneling microscope was invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer.