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The compound microscope made for anatomists by the first-named optician about 1825 has not been entirely superseded.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 More recently the lever movement was superseded by American opticians, who made other changes.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.