ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the work of van Leeuwenhoek before summarizing the key developments over the last ca 300 years, which has seen the light microscope evolve from a simple single lens device of van Leeuwenhoek's day into an instrument capable of observing the dynamics of single biological molecules inside living cells, and to tracking every cell nucleus in the development of whole embryos and plants. Prior to van Leeuwenhoek, lenses had existed for hundreds of years but it was not until the seventeenth century that their scientific potential was realized with the invention of the light microscope. There is a fundamental limit to the resolving power of the standard light microscope; these operate by projecting an image of the sample a distance of several wavelengths of light from the sample itself, known as the ‘far-field’ regime. Biological samples generate contrast in brightfield microscopy by scattering and absorbing some of the incident light.
