• 1021 - The properties of magnifying glass are first clearly described by the Arabic physicist, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), in his Book of Optics.
• 1100s - The properties of magnifying glass becomes known in Europe after Alhazen's Book of Optics is translated into Latin
• 1200s - Spectacles are developed in Italy
• 1590 - Dutch spectacle-makers Hans Jansen and his son Sacharias Jansen, claimed by later writers (Pierre Borel 1620 - 1671 or 1628 - 1689 and Willem Boreel 1591 - 1668) to have invented a compound microscope.
• 1609 - Galileo Galilei develops a compound microscope with a convex and a concave lens.
• 1612 - Galileo presents occhiolino to Polish king Sigismund III.
• 1619 - Cornelius Drebbel (1572 - 1633) presents, in London, a compound microscope with two convex lenses.
• c.1622 - Drebbel presents his invention in Rome.
• 1624 - Galileo presents his occhiolino to Prince Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei (in English, The Linceans).
• 1625 - Giovanni Faber of Bamberg (1574 - 1629) of the Linceans coins the word microscope by analogy with telescope.
• 1665 - Robert Hooke publishes Micrographia, a collection of biological micrographs. He coins the word cell for the structures he discovers in cork bark.
• 1674 - Anton van Leeuwenhoek improves on a simple microscope for viewing biological specimens.
• 1863 - Henry Clifton Sorby develops a metallurgical microscope to observe structure of meteorites.
• 1860s - Ernst Abbe discovers the Abbe sine condition, a breakthrough in microscope design, which until then was largely based on trial and error. The company of Carl Zeiss exploited this discovery and becomes the dominant microscope manufacturer of its era.
• 1931 - Ernst Ruska starts to build the first electron microscope. It is a Transmission electron microscope (TEM)
• 1936 - Erwin Müller invents the field emission microscope.
• 1938 - James Hillier builds another TEM
• 1951 - Erwin Müller invents the field ion microscope and is the first to see atoms.
• 1953 - Frits Zernike, professor of theoretical physics, receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the phase contrast microscope.
• 1955 - George Nomarski, professor of microscopy, published the theoretical basis of Differential interference contrast microscopy.
• 1967 - Erwin Müller adds time-of-flight spectroscopy to the field ion microscope, making the first atom probe and allowing the chemical identification of each individual atom.
• 1981 - Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer develop the scanning tunneling microscope.
• 1986 - Gerd Binnig, Quate, and Gerber invent the Atomic force microscope
• 1988 - Alfred Cerezo, Terence Godfrey, and George D. W. Smith applied a position-sensitive detector to the atom probe, making it able to resolve atoms in 3-dimensions.
• 1988 - Kingo Itaya invents the Electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope
• 1991 - Kelvin probe force microscope invented.

References