Are you fascinated by the world around you? Do you like investigating and experimenting on new things that you see? If so, then you must be a scientist! The need to investigate and to study things is the drive that scientists have when they are studying or researching about something. As scientist study their specimen or just about anything they always make use of instruments that could help them in their study like microscopes, telescopes, magnifying glass, binoculars, interferometer, photometer, refractometer and other optical lab instruments that they use. All the above mentioned apparatuses are optical lab instruments that process the light waves in order to enlarge the image being viewed and also inspects light waves to inspect the characteristics and properties of the observed object.

The first ever optical lab instrument used in the early ages was the telescope which was invented by Hans Lippershey in the year 1608 but the first ever optical instrument that was used by man was a pair of eyeglasses and it was in the late 1200s in Italy that was invented. The telescope was used and further developed by Galileo Galilei to observe the heavenly bodies, the sun, moon, stars, comets and other planets which greatly influenced the study of astronomy and also was very controversial in their times because he supported the study of Copernicus that the sun is the center of the solar system. Then the microscope also an optical instrument was invented by three men, Hans Lippershey, Hans Janssen with his son Zacharias. The microscope used for viewing and magnifying tiny to microscopic objects was used by Anton van Leeuwenhoek to study pond water, blood, yeasts and bacteria’s, he was also the first one to discover these microscopic objects with the use of his own improved microscope. Now we have cameras and video for storing images and even events that are memorable to us. All of these are optical instruments that use lenses in order to create an image of a certain object. The lens used is a piece of a very transparent material shaped to bend parallel light rays, the shape is often a segment of a plane or a sphere and this bending of light forms an image when the lights cross. The resulting image can be larger or smaller than the exact size of the object being viewed. This bending of light is called the refraction of light.

So just flip on the pages of this site as you want to learn more about microscope optics and other related topics.