An Englishman named Robert Hooke, born in 1635, was one of the early inventors of the microscope and microscopy. While most of his contemporaries, or the other early inventors of the microscope, were busy fitting glass lenses into telescopes for gazing distant objects, Hooke, an inventor of the microscope and a member of Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, was pretty occupied in devising microscopes for microscopy and for looking at small objects in close hands.

Hookes Microscope

This microscope that Hooke devised looked rather like a telescope. This kind of microscope consisted of two lenses at opposite ends of a long tube attached to a stand. When Hooke, an inventor of the microscope, prepared to examine a plant or an insect, he would stick it on a pin or mounted in front of the lower lens of his microscopes. At the start, he had to work underneath the sun. He did this because only sunlight was bright enough to show him his object clearly under the microscope. Later on, he added to a flaming oil lamp and a mirror to the microscope assembly. The mirror concentrated the light of the lamp and cast it over the specimen in the microscope. From then on, mirrors have been standard equipment on microscopes. Because of his curiosity towards his surroundings, Hooke, an early inventor of the microscope, looked at mosses, molds, crystals, molds, corks, the heads of flies, and the muscles and tendons of small animals under his microscope. With his experiments using the microscope, Hooke was actually the first person to record that a leaf is made of small rectangular cells arranged like bricks. He was also the first to observe the perfect crystal structure of a snowflake that he managed to catch on a black cloth. Robert Hooke made a careful drawings of everything he saw under the microscope. The famous of all, was his sensational drawing of a close up picture of a flea, enlarged to nearly 16 inches in length. He was able to record all of this with the use of his microscope. He reported his findings at weekly meetings of the Royal Society, were his colleagues wanted to see more and more of his demonstrations. This made Hooke the Curator of Experiments and charged him with taking them on a new adventure in microscopy at each of their weekly meetings.