Science is a truly wonderful and marvelous thing. It is thanks to science, after all, that we know so much about the world as it is today. We know about space. We know about planets. We know about the biology of this earth. And we know so much more about the biology of the typical human body than we ever have before.

It’s thanks to science that we have things like vaccinations. It’s thanks to science that we have heat for our homes during the long winter months and air conditioning systems to help us get through the often sweltering summers. Science has led to the creation of medicine, to the eradication of disease, and has even bettered our understanding of our past. From dinosaurs to ancient peoples, science has played a significant role in our education of where we came from – and where we will go, not only in the next few years, decades, or centuries, but in thousands and millions of years from our current date.

And science is always evolving, and has been so for quite some time. This can be seen very clearly when we look at the use of the microscope. As anyone who has ever gone through a typical course of education here in the United States knows, the microscope is a tool with many possibilities – and a huge ability to learn from. The microscope can be used to discover worlds we never would have thought existed, from viruses to bacteria to our very cells themselves (of which humans have, at any given time, up to one hundred trillion of and typically no less than seventy five trillion of).

But though the study of cells might be something we assume is modern, it’s actually far from the case. In fact, cells were first ever observed and studied all the way back in the year of 1665, when Robert Hooke looked at a piece of cork underneath the microscope of the time. And the microscope, invented in the century before, has been in use in all of the centuries that have followed, right up until the present day. And while it has most certainly become far more advanced than it was in the sixteenth century, still operates for the same basic purpose – to look at the things that we would otherwise not be able to see, or at least not be able to see well enough to thoroughly examine and study them in the ways that we do now.

And microscopes of yesteryear and today have many different uses. Back when they first originated, they were called flea glasses due to the fact that they were primarily used to look at insects. However, nowadays the typical microscope has many different applications. The microscope for inspections is a commonly used one, and can magnify things placed beneath it quite impressively. On top of this, microscope cameras have become popularized, and can be used through a microscope app for iPhone and other types of smart phones which, while certainly not as powerful as a microscope of scientific grade, can still be used for a number of purposes, even if it is just reading small print.

But it is perhaps in the field of medicine that science has been the most influential and the most revolutionary. After all, it is thanks to the microscope that bacteria was able to be drawn for the first time. It was in the year of 1683, when the scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhhoek was first able to identify bacteria and clearly draw them out to further study them, something that happened far further back in history than most people would even realize. And it is thanks to these foundations of medicine, of science, that we have been able to progress as a world to where we are and what we know today. Without such early innovators and scientists, we could not have accomplished nearly as much.

The microscope has played a crucial role in many parts of science but it is, of course, only one important component of very many throughout the field.