Many of the fine structures recorded by pioneering microscopists could not be resolved by their standard microscopes. The current research described in this presentation has shown that single lensed (i.e. simple) microscopes would have been used for high-power microscopy. Numerous unsuccessful attempts have recently been made using videomicrography to capture the images generated by early microscopes. Some of these have been well publicised, but none has managed to obtain satisfactory results. Today's talk shows that the pioneers were actually able to obtain remarkably detailed views, with instruments even from the 1600s providing sub-micron resolution. The results presented today were recently presented at the Royal Society, and they give us, for the first time, access to the images that were seen by the first microscopists.
Brian J Ford is, in the words of Nature last month, “the world’s leading expert” in his field
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110304/full/news.2011.116.html and a search for "microscope research" on Google shows him to be top in the world out of some 30,000,000 sites. Prof Ford is author of many internationally published books on the microscope and has contributed to New Scientist, British Medical Journal, Scientific American and many others; he writes a regular column entitled Critical Focus for the American magazine The Microscope. He has hosted many radio and television programmes for the BBC and other networks, and appears in television documentaries around the world. He has also written for The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and many other newspapers and is a Fellow and member of the university Court at Cardiff University, former Fellow of the Open University, and is based at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge.
This is a special public lecture as part of the Microscopy Society of Ireland 35th Annual Symposium.