The first simple microscope was made and developed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek. Leeuwenhoek lived from 1632 to 1723. He made the early microcope that had one lens, thus it was called a simple microscope. Though it only had a single lens, it was said to have been regarded as the best microscopes of his time. The simple microscope that Leeuwenhoek developed worked quite the same way as a magnifying glass would. This early microscope had limitations to the amount of magnification abilities. It was able to magnify a microscopic object to about 266 times its original size.
When the compound microscope was developed by the Janssens, it helped to advance the field of microbiology in giant leaps from where it had been only just a few years earlier. The Janssens, Hans and Zacharrias, added a second lens to magnify the image of the first lens. The Janssens lived around the 1590s. The term compound was used because it refers to the microscope having more than one lens. Under optimal conditions, the modern compound light microscopes, can magnify an object from 1000 times to 2000 times the original size of the specimen examined under the microscope. The compound microscope is also referred to as a compound light microscope. The term light refers to the way by which light transmits the image to your eye.
The very first microscopes in history however were said to have been made really invented by Hans and Zaccharias Janssen. Based on the letters of William Boreel, a Dutch envoy to the Court of France, the father and son team of the Janssens are the inventors of the microscope as they are the first to have any documentation of their work. The very first microscope that they designed had a somewhat limited function. It was said that this very first microscope could only be used for opaque objects and had a magnification of about 20 times, depending on the diameter size of its openings. This all happened even before the invention of the simple microscope of Leeuwenhoek. It was around the year 1595.

Other important people in the history of the making of the microscope existed in the past times. For example, it was a man named Ernst Leitz who introduced a revolving nosepiece design for the microscope. He was able to introduce a microscope with a revolving mount or turret for 5 objectives.This made changes magnifying of microscopically minute scpecimen easier and a lot faster. It happened around the year 1873. In the 1880s, a man named August Kohler first introduced the microscope lamp with filters. He figured a way of spacing the light source and the microscope condenser that would result to the optimum sharp image. In 1904, the first commercial UV microscope was introduced by Zeiss. The resolution is twice that of a visible light microscope.By 1931, Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska made the first electon microscope. Ruska built the first electron microscope that exceeds the resolution of the light microscope. It was in the year 1939 when Siemens supplied the first commercially available electron microscope.