Zacharias Janssen from middleburg ,Holland invented the first compound microscope in 1595.A microscope is used to see tiny particles which are not visible to the naked eye.
For millennia, the smallest thing humans could see was about as wide as a human hair. When the microscope was invented around 1590, suddenly we saw a new world of living things in our water, in our food and under our nose.
But it's unclear who invented the microscope. Some historians say it was Hans Lippershey, most famous for filing the first patent for a telescope. Other evidence points to Hans and Zacharias Janssen, a father-son team of spectacle makers living in the same town as Lippershey.
Janssen or Lippershey?
Hans Lippershey, also spelled Lipperhey, was born in Wesel, Germany in 1570, but moved to Holland, which was then enjoying a period of innovation in art and science called the Dutch Golden Age. Lippershey settled in Middelburg, where he made spectacles, binoculars and some of the earliest microscopes and telescopes.
Also living in Middelburg were Hans and Zacharias Janssen. Historians attribute the invention of the microscope to the Janssens, thanks to letters by the Dutch diplomat William Boreel.
In the 1650s, Boreel wrote a letter to the physician of the French king in which he described the microscope. In his letter, Boreel said Zacharias Janssen started writing to him about a microscope in the early 1590s, although Boreel only saw a microscope himself years later. Some historians argue Hans Janssen helped build the microscope, as Zacharias was a teenager in the 1590s.
Early microscopes
The early Janssen microscopes were compound microscopes, which use at least two lenses. The objective lens is positioned close to the object and produces an image that is picked up and magnified further by the second lens, called the eyepiece.
A Middelburg museum has one of the earliest Janssen microscopes, dated to 1595. It had three sliding tubes for different lenses, no tripod and was capable of magnifying three to nine times the true size. News about the microscopes spread quickly across Europe.