c.1590

Dutch spectacle-makers Hans and Zacharias Janssen invent the compound microscope.

1610

German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) invents the modern compound microscope.

1675

Anton van Leeuwenhoek invents the simple microscope.

1826

British biologist Dames Smith (d. 1870) constructs a microscope with much reduced chromatic and spherical aberrations.

1827

Italian scientist Giovanni Amici (1786–1863) invents the reflecting achromatic microscope.

1861

British chemist Joseph Reade (1801–70) invents the kettledrum microscope condenser.

1912

British microscopist Joseph Barnard (1870–1949) invents the ultramicroscope.

1932

Dutch physicist Frits Zernike (1888–1966) invents the phase-contrast microscope.

1936

German-born US physicist Erwin Mueller (1911–77) invents the field-emission microscope.

1938

German engineer Ernst Ruska (1906–88) develops the electron microscope.

1940

Canadian scientist James Hillier (1915–2007) makes a practical electron microscope.

1951

Erwin Mueller invents the field-ionization microscope.

1978

US scientists of the Hughes Research Laboratory invent the scanning ion microscope.

1981

German physicist Gerd Binning (1947– ) and Swiss physicist Heinrich Rohrer (1933–2013) invent the scanning tunnelling microscope.

1985

Gerd Binning invents the atomic force microscope.

1987

James van House and Arthur Rich invent the positron microscope.

1990

Richard Henderson produces the first atomic-resolution images of a protein using cryo-electron microscopy.

1992

Douglas Prasher clones the gene for green fluorescent protein, paving the way for the use of fluorescent proteins in microscopy.

1994–96

Stefan Hell and colleagues introduce the first techniques of super-resolution microscopy, thus breaking the ‘diffraction barrier’ of light microscopy.

2002

A photoactivable green fluorescent protein is developed that fluoresces only when activated by violet or ultraviolet light.

2006

Further advances in super-resolution microscopy are introduced: photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM) and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM).

2008

Live embryo development in zebrafish recorded by Philipp Keller and colleagues using digital scanned laser lightsheet fluorescence microscopy.

2013

Researchers at Stanford University develop CLARITY, a new technique for visualizing intact entire organs by replacing lipids with transparent hydrogel-based mesh to enable successive rounds of staining and antibody labelling.

2016

Cryo-electron microscopy used to visualize the structure of the nucleosome core particle with high resolution.

2018

First ultrathin optical lenses based on metasurface materials constructed to produce full-colour images.