Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [37]
According to one of my favorite scientific tall tales, the first microscope was “invented” in the mid-1500s by some unnamed lunkhead who mistakenly used his telescope backward. “Land ho!” became—bump!—“Oh, land,” and a new instrument was christened. But the true story is a lot more complicated. Its origins can be traced as far back as the earliest recorded descriptions of optical phenomena. Magnification by curved transparent surfaces was recognized by the first-century Roman philosopher Seneca, for instance, who wrote that “letters, however minute and obscure, are seen larger and clearer through a glass bulb full of water.” This effect was also created by polished gems, as reported around the same time by Pliny the Elder, who noted that the nearsighted Emperor Nero used an emerald to improve his vision while watching gladiatorial contests. The height of decadence, it seems to me, Nero’s emerald monocle must’ve been both effective and stylish, but there’s no evidence that he launched a trend. Which stands to reason. Not to be myopically insensitive, but one cannot envy what one cannot see. It would be another twelve centuries before the use of concave lenses for the deliberate purpose of enhancing eyesight was proposed, credit for which goes to the English monk Roger Bacon, who in his encyclopedic Opus of 1267 also predicted the invention of the microscope. His contribution to the field of microscopy was only acknowledged in retrospect, however. The monk was imprisoned for heresy, and his writings remained undiscovered until the eighteenth century.
The invention of spectacles as we know them today was made independently around the year 1285 in Florence by a man named Salvino degli Armati, a fact that, oddly, wasn’t made public until after his death some thirty years later. It seems that, like a well-guarded family recipe, he shared his creation with only a select group of friends. Subsequently, though, the use of eyeglass lenses took hold and spread throughout Europe. And it was only a matter of time before someone, rather than placing lenses side by side, arranged them one before the other, thus creating a compound magnifying instrument. Official recognition for the first microscope, however, is often ceded to a Dutch spectacle maker, Zacharias Jansen, who in 1590 combined two curved glass lenses in a small tube as a means for studying minute objects. Seventy-five years later an Englishman, Robert Hooke, stirred the public’s imagination with his startling book on microscopy, Micrographia (1665). In it Hooke described and illustrated what he’d observed using his own compound microscope—the hairs on fleas and snow crystals, for example. He also unknowingly coined a new scientific term when writing on why cork floats. Under magnification, the tiny air pockets he saw looked like the small rooms in monasteries, commonly called cells. Hooke had no idea at the time that he’d discovered plant cells.
One noteworthy person who picked up a copy of Micrographia was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Though it’s doubtful the Dutchman could have read the English text, the lush engravings of the small-made-big must have made his brain itch. He began to tinker. Rather than duplicating the elegant but complicated two-foot-tall microscope Hooke had drawn in the book, he went in the opposite direction. Borrowing the basic design of the magnifying glass he used in his shop to inspect the weave of fabrics, he crafted a lightweight, handheld device that housed a single lens. What to others