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Were the First Microscopes Really That Good?

When I see a drawing by an earty microcopist, I am often Impressed by the amount of detail they illustrated. I am frequently amazed by the resolution they apparently were able to achieve with primitive (by today's standards) unconected optics. Were their instruments and observational skills realty that good, or were they just lucky, correctly guessing what was beneath their lens? In an amazing pictorial published in the April issue of Scientific American, Brian Ford convincingly answers this question. Ford describes the controversies surrounding descriptions by Antony van Leeuwenhoek in 1674 and Robert Brown in 1827. Both of these pioneer microscopists were often dismissed by their contemporaries and ignored for many years after their deaths. Leeuwenhoek was considered to be a man of fertile imagination whose observations of “animalcules” in pond slime were not appreciated until the time of Louis Pasteur.