Gas microscope

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Hydrooxygen Gas Microscope, or gas microscope for short , was a type of projection microscope , whereby the light was directed through a converging lens onto the object to be illuminated and enlarged, from which an enlarged image was then projected onto a white wall with the help of several achromatic lenses . The structure of the optical parts corresponded completely to the solar microscope , only that artificial light was used instead of sunlight, namely the Drummond light developed by Thomas Drummond . A piece of quicklime is brought to a white glow by means of a hydrogen gas flame into which a stream of oxygen gas is blown .

The invention is attributed to the English microscope maker John Cary (1754-1835) in 1832 in Herders Conversations-Lexikon of 1855 . The first public demonstration probably actually took place on February 18, 1833, in a collaboration between Cary and the London chemist and mineralogist John Thomas Cooper (1790-1854).

literature

  • Hydrooxygen gas microscope . In: Herders Conversations-Lexikon . tape 3 . Freiburg im Breisgau 1855, p. 378 ( zeno.org ).
  • Kentwood D. Wells: Fleas the Size of Elephants: the Wonders of the Oxyhydrogen Microscope. In: The Magic Lantern Gazette. A Journal of Research. Volume 29, No. 2/3, Summer / Fall 2017, ISSN  1059-1249 , pp. 3–34, digitized
  • Hugo von Mohl: micrography; or, Instructions for the knowledge and use of the microscope. Verlag von LF Fues, Tübingen 1846. Reprint Harvard University, 2008. therein the chapter The solar microscope, the gas microscope and the photo-electric microscope , p. 229 ff.
  • Brian Stevenson: The Cary-Gould-Porter optical businesses. last updated September 2019. microscopist.net, Historical Makers of Microscopes and Microscope Slides.