| 1611 | Kepler suggested a way of making a compound microscope. |
| 1655 | Hooke used a compound microscope to describe small pores in sections of cork that he
called "cells". |
| 1674 | Leeuwenhoek reported his discovery of protozoa. He saw bacteria for the first time nine
years later. |
| 1833 | Brown published his microscopic observations of orchids, clearly describing the cell
nucleus. |
| 1838 | Schleiden and Schwann proposed the cell theory, stating that the nucleated cell is the unit of
structure and function in plants and animals. |
| 1857 | Kolliker described mitochondria in muscle cells. |
| 1876 | Abbéanalyzed the effects of diffraction on image formation in the microscope and
showed how to optimize microscope design. |
| 1879 | Flemming described with great clarity chromosome behavior during mitosis in animal
cells. |
| 1881 | Retzius described many animal tissues with a detail that has not been surpassed by any
other light microscopist. In the next two decades he, Cajal, and other histologists developed staining methods and laid the foundations of
microscopic anatomy. |
| 1882 | Koch used aniline dyes to stain microorganisms and identified the bacteria that
cause tuberculosis and cholera. In the following two decades other
bacteriologists, such as Klebs and Pasteur, identified the causative agents of many other diseases by examining stained
preparations under the microscope. |
| 1886 | Zeiss made a series of lenses, to the design of Abbé, that enabled microscopists to resolve structures at the theoretical limits of
visible light. |
| 1898 | Golgi first saw and described the Golgi apparatus by staining cells with silver
nitrate. |
| 1924 | Lacassagne and collaborators developed the first autoradiographic method to localize
radioactive polonium in biological specimens. |
| 1930 | Lebedeff designed and built the first interference microscope. In 1932 Zernicke invented the phase-contrast microscope. These two developments allowed
unstained living cells to be seen in detail for the first time. |
| 1941 | Coons used antibodies coupled to fluorescent dyes to detect cellular antigens. |
| 1952 | Nomarskidevised and patented the system of differential interference contrast for the
light microscope that still bears his name. |
| 1981 | Allen and Inoué perfected video-enhanced-contrast light microscopy. |
| 1988 | Commercial confocal scanning microscopes came into widespread use. |
