Timeline of microscope technology

1590 - Dutch spectacle-makers, Hans Janssen and his son Zacharias Janssen, claimed by later writers (Pierre Borel 1620 - 1671 or 1628 - 1689 and Willem Boreel 1591 - 1668) to have invented a compound microscope, but this is disputed.
1609 - Galileo Galilei develops an occhiolino or 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 invents the simple microscope.
1931 - Ernst Ruska builds the first electron microscope.
1981 - Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer develops the scanning tunneling microscope.