Ever since Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) used his simple magnifying devices for viewing biological material, the study of cells and tissues at the microscopic scale has largely been driven by technological advances. In the mid-19th century, the collaboration among Carl Zeiss (1816-1888), Ernst Abbe (1840-1905), and Otto Schott (1851-1935) made the industrial manufacturing of high-quality microscopes possible, placing them into the hands of a larger number of scientists and triggering an avalanche of new discoveries that laid the foundation for the fields of histology/ microanatomy and later, cell biology. During the 20th century, new technologies, such as the invention of the electron microscope by Ernst Ruska (1906-1988) and epifluorescence microscopy, advanced our knowledge about biological structures to even smaller dimensions.
展开▼
