The first compound microscopes produced by Zacharias Janssen (Dutch,1580-1638)in 1595 , was simply a tube with lenses at each end. The magnification of these early scopes ranged from 3X to 9X, depending on the size of the diaphragm openings. In 1608,  Hans Lippershey, applied for a patent on his magnifying tube which enlarged distant objects.  He reported also used variations of it to enlarge subjects near at hand.  A few months later, Italian instrument maker Galileo made his own magnifying tube.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek( England,1632-1723), was a man with many talents, his most important attributes were creativity, power of observation, and ingenuity. Leeuwenhoek was a common man without any fortune or formal education, so he had to work for a living. Leeuwenhoek made simple (one lens) microscopes. He was not the first person to build a microscope, but the microscopes that he did build were the best ones for that time period. Leeuwenhoek was the first person to describe bacteria (from teeth scrapings), protozoans (from pond water), helped to prove the theory of blood circulation. He gained much of his inspiration form reading Robert Hooke's Micrographia.

Robert Hooke( England,1635-1703), the English father of microscopy, re-confirmed Leeuwenhoek's discoveries of the existence of tiny living organisms in a drop of water. Hooke made a copy of Leeuwenhoek's microscope and then improved upon his design. He looked at a sliver of cork through a microscope lens and noticed some "pores" or "cells" in it. Robert Hooke believed the cells had served as containers for the "noble juices" or "fibrous threads" of the once-living cork tree. He thought these cells existed only in plants, since he and his scientific contemporaries had observed the structures only in plant material.
obert Hooke wrote Micrographia, the first book describing observations made through a microscope. Hooke was the first person to use the word "cell" to identify microscopic structures when he was describing cork.

Joseph Jackson Lister(England, 1786 - 1869) was an Quaker wine merchant and amateur microscopist who developed an improved lens system for microscopes in 1830. (Although achromatic telescope lenses had been available for decades, the small size of microscope lenses had made them impossible to correct.) Lister developed the spaced system of lenses which both corrects chromatic aberration and reduces spherical aberration. With this instrument, Lister was the first to observe the forms of mammalian blood cells. He was elected to the Royal Society. Lister’s son, Joseph Lister, the founder of antiseptic surgery, was trained in microscopy by his father.

August Kohler (1866-1948), pioneers in optics, in 1894, development of the superior microscope illumination technique bearing his name (Kohler illumination) and which is still the inmortantest illumination technique of modern microscop today.

Phase contrast microscopy, first described in 1934 by Frits Zernike （ Dutch, 1888-1966 ）， is a contrast-enhancing optical technique that can be utilized to produce high-contrast images of transparent specimens, such as living cells, microorganisms, thin tissue slices, lithographic patterns, fibers, latex dispersions, glass fragments, and subcellular particles (including nuclei and other organelles).