The social history of the microscope

SUMMARY The motivation for elevating the microscope from an optical toy to an optical instrument derived from the mid‐seventeenth‐century belief in the subliminal, mechanical organization of the natural world. The microscope failed to reveal this corpuscular realm, but its success in popular instruction and entertainment secured its place in the growing amateur pursuit of natural philosophy in the eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century the development of the achromatic objective gave the microscope a new technical potential, a potential exploited to its full extent by the members of the Microscopical Society of London. The British makers were very successfully engaged with advanced technical development in the mid‐century, but saw their dominance of the market decline with the growing demand for large numbers of instruments aimed at professional applications.