Robert Hooke's Discovery of Cells in 1665

A huge step forward in microbiology was the invention of the microscope. So the discovery of cells and the development of cell theory due to the invention of high-powered microscopes in the 17th century. The first microscopes were very simple and had very limited magnifying power. There is some debate surrounding who invented the first microscope, but there is evidence of early microscopes being invented even as early as the first century, but they probably were not very useful when it came to observing cells. Zacharias Janssen and the first compound microscope, Zacharias and Hans Janssen, were able to combine magnifying lenses together that resulted in an image that was nine times larger than what could be seen with the naked eye. So with the discovery and invention of the compound microscope, we were able to finally start to look at the microscopic world around us. English scientist Robert Hooke discovered cells while looking at a thin slice of cork. And if you don't know what cork is, cork is actually dead plant cells. So he described the cells as cells, used the term cells, because they resembled tiny boxes and looked somewhat like the tiny boxes of a honeycomb. So here we actually see an illustration from his 1665, from Robert Hooke's 1665 book, Micrographia, and this is actually an illustration of the sample of cork that he observed as the first cells observed under a microscope.