From the android microscope app to the USB microscope camera to the iPhone microscope app, there are many ways in which microscopes have become widely applicable for daily use by the general population. In addition to this, of course, is the fact that microscopes are still considered to be powerful teaching tools, used in schools all throughout the United States and beyond it as well. With microscopes in nearly every high school and even middle school science classroom, students are able to see things from a new perspective, learning in a very hands on way that connects them directly to whatever material is in question.

But even with modern innovations like the android microscope app and the microscope app for iOS, the history of the microscope is still a very impressive one and is, after the all, how we have gotten to the ability to develop things like the android microscope app in the first place. But many would be surprised to know that the microscope, at least in its original form, dates back centuries – back to the sixteenth century, in fact. While it is not known exactly how the microscope came to be – and who precisely invented it – we can pinpoint the vague time in which it was first created.

And we have a few educated guesses as who pioneered it. Some people think that it was Hans Lippershey who invented it, as it was he who first filed a patent for the microscope all the way back in the year of 1590. However, others think differently, believing that Hans and Zacharias Janssen invented it, a father and son duo who made spectacles. This is probable, as they lived in the very same town as the aforementioned Hans Lippershey.

However, there have been many innovative discoveries made with the microscope by many different people over the years, least of the person who created the android microscope app, bringing the power of the microscope into the hands of the everyday smartphone user here in the United States and all around the world as well. But going back a few centuries, a few very important – even crucial to the way that science has developed – scientific discoveries were made in that first century of access to the microscopic world.

For instance, the first recorded microscope observations were not made until the year of 1625, more than thirty years after the initial invention of the microscope. These recordings were made by a scientist named Francesco Stelluti, who lived in Italy. His observations were made up of a detailed drawing of a bee that he observed under a microscope, drew, and then published. Other important observations have also come from the microscope using similar methods of observations.

Take Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, an esteemed scientist taught in just about every high school biology class throughout the United States. And that acclaim has been earned, as he was the first ever person to make a concrete drawing of bacteria – something he did in the year of 1683, at the end of the seventeenth century. However, though these drawing were made so long ago, we have been able to build off of them to discover what we now know about bacteria today, here in the year of 2018.

Years before the android microscope app was ever invented, the microscope was most frequently used for the study of insects. In fact, insects were incredibly commonly viewed under microscopes in the sixteenth century, right after the microscope had first been invented. So common was this usage of the microscope that they were even nicknamed flea glasses for many years – though they are not still called that today.

Even cells themselves were first discovered thanks to the ability to use a microscope. This discovery happened back in the year of 1665, by a man named Robert Hooke, another esteemed scientist of the period. He first saw what came to be known as cells when he observed a piece of cork beneath a microscope. Soon, the discovery and growing understanding of human cells would be made, for which that first observation of cork became a crucial stepping stone towards.