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 builds the first electron microscope.
• 1953 - Frits Zernike, professor of theoretical physics, Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the phase contrast optical microscope .
• 1981 - Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer develop the scanning tunneling microscope.