The microscope has been many things: an aristocrat’s toy, a craftsman’s pride and joy, an artist’s tool, and an aide to great scientific discoveries. It solves mysteries, teaches kids, and starts fads.

And it immortalizes and defines us.

Take Leeuwenhoek, for example. His work, his skill, his knowledge of the world, is all captured in his microscope. Hundreds of years later, we pick up that 'scope and peer into it and he comes back to us. A little bit of him is embedded in it: we marvel at the craftsmanship in the smelted screws and polished lenses, for instance, and his skill is remembered. He is immortal through this thing, this artifact. It defines him now, illuminates his life; the way he defined it and its use, over four hundred years ago.

As Prof. Shanks said, "History is folded all around us into stuff," and the microscope is no exception. When I head into lab and look into a microscope, the implement in my hands holds hundreds of years of history, scientific discovery, manufacture and evolution.

But more than that -- looking into the eyepiece, seeing, perhaps, a fly's eye, I feel that same excitement Leeuwenhoek must have felt, looking through his eyepiece, seeing nearly the same thing.

We are, after all, cyborgs, and the microscope is a marvelous extension of ourselves. Hooke marveled in his microscope, calling it an "artificial Organ." In his words, it allows us a glimpse into "regions of matter hitherto inaccessible, impenetrable, and imperceptible by the senses unassisted... it inlarges the empire of the senses, so it besieges and straitens the recesses of nature."

Or, as my friend Yvonne said over dinner a couple days ago, "I watched frog eggs developing into tadpoles in my lab last week under the microscope. It's just so cool to see life unfolding before your eyes..."

In all its incarnations, whether ornate, plain, palm-sized or car-sized, the microscope has always retained one thing -- its ability to extend our senses. Whether in the hands of an aristocrat, a child, or a scientist, it remains a transformer of the ordinary into something extraordinary. A hair, a drop of river water or blood, the graphite off your ordinary #2 pencil... when magnified, anything can become a fantastical frontier.

The microscope extends us, and thus enables us to see new worlds in the smallest of things. And it keeps evolving, leaving a trail of itself -- and our own history -- behind for us to marvel at. Even today, as electron microscopes break the world into ever smaller pieces, and fluorescence microscopes light up cells like a fireworks show, Leeuwenhoek's centuries-old 'scope still speaks to us from centuries away. Past, present, future, all meet here, in this one instrument. No wonder we are so fascinated by it. We are defined by the ‘scope, even as it continues to define us and the worlds we know.

And on top of that, does it make pretty pictures or what?

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Back to the Microscope main page...

Or, back to my musings on the Modern Microscope.