Microscope

A microscope is an instrument for examining objects too small to be seen by the naked eye; the earliest known compound microscopes, which combine an objective lens near the specimen with an eyepiece, appeared in Europe around 1620. The inventor is unknown, and claims have been made for spectacle makers in the Netherlands and for Cornelis Drebbel. It remained largely a novelty until the 1660s and 1670s, when naturalists in Italy, the Netherlands and England began using it to study biology; Antonie van Leeuwenhoek reported the discovery of micro-organisms in 1676.