The history of microscopy has focused on better and better resolution, as has been documented on these pages [e.g., J.-P Revel). As one can see in the first graph, the early improvement in resolution was agonizingly slow, as it was dependent on technological improvements in optics and methods for preparing specimens. Hans and Zacharias Jensenn are credited with being the first to put two lenses in the same optical path to create a primitive microscope in 1590 Nearly a century later Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was impaling specimens an needles. Whereas van Leeuwenhoek and other observers were able to make significant observations to change fundamental concepts of their day, microscopists such as Ernst Abbe, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, Lord John Rayleigh and Carl Zeiss brougnt us to the brink of optimal performance of the light microscope.