Remember that Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes were not the first. That is an important point to emphasize at the outset. Many descriptions of microscopes show the simple type of instrument he made, as it were, at the base of the microscopes family tree, so that the complicated contractions of more recent years spring from these simple beginning. But that is an error.

Microscopes were in an existence for perhaps half a century before Leeuwenhoek made his first example. What is more, the recognizable modern shape of microscope, with a body tube, an objective lens near the object and an eyepiece for viewing, was already in existence before Leeuwenhoek went to school. The point of interest is not that his microscope was earlier, just that it was better.

A second and perhaps more common misrepresentation is that the simple microscope was a temporary aberration, a short phase in the history of microscopy that is scarcely worth considering at length. That too is wrong. Simple microscopes were still in popular use up to the middle years of the last century, so the instrument had a history that lasted for at least 200 years. As late as 1854 the Society of Arts awarded a prize for the design of a new sim0ple microscope, as we shall see, and the Zeiss doubtlet lens of the same era was found to be significantly inferior to the lens in the Leeuwenhoek microscope.

Why then have we heard so little of simple microscopes? I think that a large part of the answers lies in the fashions that come and go in science, and also in the snobbishness of science. Simple microscopes always had a bad press. They were ‘crude’ or plain, ‘ordinary’ or basic. The Victorian compound microscope, by contrast, was complicated and glamorous and just the instrument to boast about.