Evolution of the Modern Achromatic Microscope.
The great advances made in the optical arrangements of the modern microscope necessitated important changes and improvements in its several mechanical parts. Indeed, as the apertures of objectives became increased, and focal planes became correspondingly shallower, it was absolutely necessary to apply a more sensitive system of focussing than that for many years past commonly in use. The leading manufacturers at once grasped the situation, and in a short space of time the older model microscopes were discarded, and replaced by instruments better in workmanship and finish, and in every way more suitable for the student and the promotion of original scientific research.
From an early period English amateurs appear to have bestowed greater attention on the improvement of the microscope than those of any other country. Between 1820 and 1835 Tully, Pritchard, Dolland, James Smith, Andrew Ross, and Hugh Powell, encouraged by Wollaston, Brewster, Goring, Herschel, and Lister, worked out innumerable combinations of single and compound lenses to be employed as simple microscopes, explained in a previous chapter.
The theories propounded about this time for the improvement of lenses and the various combinations for amateurs were not of lasting value. Nevertheless, they were not wholly made in vain, as during the last twenty years they have indirectly borne good fruit, inasmuch as by working in another direction Professor Abbe was led to the discovery of new and better kinds of glass, by which the secondary spectrum has been so nearly eliminated, and the optical parts of the microscope so materially improved. In pursuing this subject I would not have it supposed that Continental opticians were either idle or supine. On the contrary, Oberhäuser, Fraunhofer, Chevalier, Nachet, Hartnach, and others took an active part in the work.
The compound microscope made for anatomists by the first-named optician about 1825 has not been entirely superseded. He was the first to make a rotating stage, to apply mechanism to focussing, and to introduce the system of direct push or pull of the condenser tube within the sub-stage socket. Nachet made other improvements on the Oberhäuser microscope by applying under the stage a tail-piece having a dove-tailed groove in which a slide carrying the sub-stage was moved by a stud-pin. More recently the lever movement was superseded by American opticians, who made other changes. Hartnach ultimately very much improved Oberhäuser’s model, and this remains with us.
The English modern compound microscope, together with the achromatic objective, we owe to a mind teeming with scientific inventions, Joseph Jackson Lister, F.R.S., who in 1826 supplied Mr. Tully, a well-known London optician of that period, with original drawings for the important improvements in its mechanical details and accessory apparatus which followed so soon afterwards.
Among the many ingenious novelties enumerated in his published papers we find the graduated lengthening of the body-tube of the microscope; a stage-fitting for clamping and rotating the object; a subsidiary stage; a dark-well, and a large disc to incline and rotate opaque objects; a ground-glass light moderator; a live-box with bevelled flat-glass plate; an erector-eye-piece; an adapter for using Wollaston’s camera lucida for microscopical drawing; and, above all, a combination of lenses to act as a condenser under the object (evidently the first approach to the present achromatic sub-stage condenser). The value of the erector-eye-piece for facilitating dissections under the microscope is not even yet sufficiently appreciated. Tully published a descriptive account of Lister’s microscope, the first one of which he made, and acknowledged his indebtedness to “Mr. Lister’s ingenuity and skill.” Shortly afterwards Lister made known his discovery of the two aplanatic foci in a double achromatic object glass, and gave verbal directions to the three principal makers of microscopes in London, James Smith, Andrew Ross, and Hugh Powell, for the future construction of the achromatic objective, all of whom were intent on the improvement of their several models. To the latter the Society of Arts awarded, in 1832, a medal for his improved mechanical stage movements, on the “Turrell system,” which Powell first constructed for Edmund Turrell. This stage was made to rotate completely on its optic axis by means of an obliquely-placed pinion acting on a bevelled rack on the inner face of the stage-ring supporting the mechanism. In 1834 Powell once more received a Society of Arts medal, “the Iris,” for improvements in the application of a new form of fine adjustment.
About the same date (1835) Andrew Ross introduced the socket-carrier of the body-tube of the microscope on a strong stem, with rack bent in the middle, thus affording space for a larger stage. He likewise devised the hollow cross-bar, placed at right angles to the rack-stem, whereby he was enabled to use a new system of fine adjustment, consisting of a delicate screw with large milled head, acting by a point on the long arm of a lever, the short arm of which ends in a fork in contact with a stud placed on either side of a cylindrical sliding tube forming the nose-piece of the body-tube, and into which the objective is screwed. A spiral spring presses down the nose-piece, and against this the screw and lever act.
This appears to have been the first really sensitive focussing method applied to the nose-piece; it was, and probably is, one of the most delicate systems ever applied to the microscope. It has enjoyed a long period of popularity, and I believe it still survives in Powell and Lealand’s instruments, which are very generally admitted to be of superior excellence for all purposes where extreme delicacy of focussing is an essential element.
The rival system of fine adjustment—the short lever and screw applied externally to the body-tube—known as the Lister-Jackson system, which appears to have been contrived to allow the body-tube to be supported more firmly on the limb or stem, has had its merits ably realised in the microscopes of Smith and Beck and their successors, but, except as modified by the successors of Andrew Ross (Schrœder’s form), it is, I believe, admitted that it has been superseded by other modifications lately introduced into the Ross-Jackson instrument.
The year 1830 was, however, a propitious period in the history of the modern microscope, as in January of that year Mr. Lister published his epoch-making paper, “On the Improvement of the Achromatic Microscope.” This appeared together with certain personal practical directions (for no man was ever more anxious to communicate his knowledge than Mr. Lister) to the before-mentioned opticians, which led up to changes lasting until 1840, when, by the efforts of this gentleman and his personal friends, “The Microscopical Society of London” came into existence. Among the more prominent members of the Society was Mr. George Jackson, a name still well known to microscopists, and who, jointly with Mr. Lister, gave us the Jackson-Lister form of microscope. This was forthwith accepted as a perfect model. Soon after Andrew Ross effected a further change in the instrument, shown in [Fig. 54] in its complete form as left by this optician. It is here represented as having a bar movement, with a claw foot bolted to two uprights to carry the trunnions with the body and stage. This base, is insufficiently wide and extended to carry so large an instrument with its centre of gravity so high. The coarse adjustment bar also was rectangular, and the fine adjustment a lever, with the milled head in the middle of the bar, which involved a certain amount of tremor; withal it was an instrument of excellent workmanship, and its defects were not regarded as irremediable. Messrs. Ross, however, preferred to construct an entirely new model designed by Zentmayer, the “Ross-Jackson-Zentmayer,” to which I shall refer presently. A later model, however, has to some extent taken its place, “the Histological and Bacteriological Microscope,” [Fig. 55].
Fig. 54.—An early Ross-Jackson Microscope.
My reference to the older form of instrument is chiefly with the view of directing attention to the sensitive focussing system, applied in the first instance to the nose-piece; now placed below the coarse adjustment. It certainly is a delicate form of fine adjustment. This model possesses other points of interest well worth preserving, which fully entitle it to occupy the prominent place given in the list of the house of Ross. In the Ross-Jackson “Histological and Bacteriological Microscope” much attention seems to have been given to eliminate certain weak points in the earlier Ross-Jackson model—defects still extant in stands of certain English and foreign makers—while retaining the more practical improvements of both constructions. Steadiness is secured by an extension of the tripod or claw-foot and the shorter and more solid uprights that sustain the whole weight of the instrument.
Fig. 55.—The Ross-Jackson Histological Microscope.
Fig. 56.—Powell and Lealand’s Students’ Microscope, with Amici prism arranged for oblique illumination, the Sub-stage and Condenser being detached.
The Ross-Jackson, then, survives, together with the original tripod stand of Hugh Powell’s, upon which he expended all the resources of the practical optician, and applied the early principles involved in the Lister-Jackson instrument, but from different points of view. However, there is hardly a choice between one and the other in workmanship, both opticians having furnished microscopes of a typical class and very high order. The firm of Powell and Lealand have but one form of stand, from which they have never been tempted to deviate. It is supported on a true tripod base, forming a solid and substantial support to the body, which is of such a length as to give as nearly as possible the standard optical interval of 10 inches between the posterior principal focus of the objective and the anterior focus of the eye-piece; the variation in the optical tube length does not exceed a quarter of an inch with objectives of ½ inch and upwards. The arm on which the body is fixed is 5¾ inches long, which not only gives a clearance of 3½ inches from the optic axis, but also permits of the introduction of a long fine-adjustment lever.
Fig. 57.—Powell’s larger No. 2 Instrument.
Fig. 58.—Powell and Lealand’s Students’ Microscope arranged for direct illumination. A. Secondary or Sub-stage racked up to bring the Achromatic Condenser close to the object.
The cross arm encloses the lever mechanism for the fine adjustment, as originally devised by Andrew Ross. This cross arm is longer than that used by Ross, and carries the body more forward, so as to provide radial space for the complete rotation of the stage and the optic axis, and at the same time the lever of the adjustment is lengthened, and delicacy of motion secured. The stage retains the mechanical movements invented by E. Turrell, and first applied by Hugh Powell. It also rotates completely by means of an obliquely placed pinion acting on a bevelled rack on the inner face of the stage-ring supporting the mechanism. Finders are engraved on the plates, and the main support of the stage-ring is graduated for angle measuring, a pointer on the ring marking the unit of motion in arc.
The sub-stage is carried by rack-work, and has rectangular centring movements, supporting an inner socket that can be rotated by rack and pinion, and which carries the several sub-stage accessories. A fine adjustment, by screw-cone and stud, is applied by means of an extra slide.
The stage is attached to the sheath of the stem by a special arrangement of screws, by which the rotation in the optic axis can be centred; sliding spring clips and a movable and a removable and adjustable angle-piece to hold the slides are applied on the upper surface. The body-tube is pivoted to move laterally on the top of the stem, and an adjustable steel stud beneath serves to stop the movement in the axis. Such is Powell’s present instrument, and it represents the results of sixty years’ steady devotion to secure perfection, and at the same time embody the best ideas of mechanical design by Andrew Ross.
A cheaper form of students’ microscope is furnished by Powell and Lealand, with ¾-inch stage movement, coarse and fine adjustments to body, plane and concave mirrors, revolving diaphragm, two eye-pieces, and Lister’s dark wells. These makers also adopt a gauge of tubing, the size being such that it will take in a binocular body, a Huyghenian 2 inch eye-piece having the largest field-glass possible. The tube of the sub-stage is the same size, so as to secure one gauge of tubing throughout. This allows of a Kellner or other eye-piece to be used as a condenser.