FIRST IMAGE OF IT'S KIND - Micrograph by Dr. Hooke - 1665

[Barney64]

I though you might enjoy one of the first images of the sort that we enjoy here today.

It is humbling to think this was all done by hand and eye using the very first and crudest of microscopes. To put it in time context, the following year saw the Great Fire of London.





The text to the image, from Hooke's Microgrphia, is available on-line ( http://www.restoredprints.com/HKE001text.htm ) and is well worth a read. I can't help smiling when I read this extract:

“One of these, put into spirit of wine, was very quickly seemingly kill’d and both its eyes and mouth began to look very red, but upon the taking of it out, and suffering it to lie three to four hours, and heating it with the Sun beams cast through a Burning glass, was again reviv’d, seeming, as it were, to have been all the intermediate time, but dead drunk, and after certain hours to grow fresh again and sober”

So killing in alcohol (spirit of wine) and frying with a magnifying glass doesn't do flies any harm then? Hmmm. Methinks maybe someone had been at the spirits of wine too.

[Hindpool]

Thanks to Barney64 for showing us a couple of Robert Hooke's engravings from Micrographia. It was the first book on microscopy and the first book published by the Royal Society where Hooke was the director of experiments, the scientific director in effect.

The drawings look astonishingly accurate and striking even now after 350 years' of progress in microscopy. Imagine how these and other remarkable images must have seemed to the first purchasers of Micrographia. No-one had ever seen such detail before and the fact that Hooke's images are so accurate has aroused a good deal of interest in the microscopes he used for his observations.

In a fairly recent lecture (October 29, 2010) at the Royal Society, London, Professor Brian Ford reasoned that Hooke used a simple (meaning here non-compound) microscope of his own construction for his work and produced ample evidence to back his assertions. The lecture, which I was fortunate enough to attend, is or soon will be available as a pod-cast from the Royal Society's web site.

http://royalsociety.org/Podcasts-of-Library-events/

A single lens microscope with a carefully ground objective, in the hands of an exceptionally keen observer brought microscopy to the attention of 17th century scientifically minded men in London and the leading cities of Europe. Hooke and his Micrographia certainly had a major role in the foundation of scientific microscopy.

[Barney64]

Just to fill in a little detail on Hindpool's interesting notes, Dr. Hooke used a Galileo type of microscope (compound) made for him by Christopher Cock of London. I believe it is now at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

[Hindpool]

Thanks Barney64, for your further comments.

I found it difficult to accept the concept of a single lens microscope being used for serious work but Prof. Ford's latest researches convinced me that Robert Hooke did indeed use such a 'simple' instrument when preparing the drawings for the Micrographia engravings. The problem with compound microscopes of that era was their poor resolution. In his lecture Ford argued, convincingly I thought, that the detail shown in the famous flea and lice Micrographia engravings could not have been resolved with the then current models, including Hooke's own Christopher Cock compound.

Hooke's pioneering publication was well known to Antony van Leeuwenhoek, then working as a draper in Delft, The Netherlands. The Dutchman unquestionably used single lens microscopes made by him in the manner described by Hooke in the preface to Micrographia. We all know how well they performed, permitting the brilliant Dutchman to see and accurately describe bacteria, spermatozoa and protozoa amongst other previously unknown subjects. If Hooke was microscopy's first publicist, Van Leeuwenhoek was its first scientist.

I am not an academic, nor a scientist, just an old guy who enjoys microscopy as a retirement pastime. The history of microscopy provides plenty of intriguing bedtime reading for when the dust covers are over my microscopes!

[Pau]

Hindpool,
I think you are right. Despite Hooke's high relevance in the microscopy history ( the cell name for exemple), the Leeuwenhoek high power microscope observations were better, and the simple microscope for low power work (sometimes known as dissecting microscope) was very usual until the first decades of the XX century.

Even today some of us use simple microscopes for photographic work: microscope objectives mounted on bellows to direct project the image in the camera sensor