The first textbook of microscopy , and the first publication of the Royal Society, was Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1660. Hooke’s work demonstrated that images of superb detail could be produced by a magnifying glass, provided the lens was very small. He made his lenses by melting a thin rod of glass to produce a spherical bead a millimetre or so in diameter and then grinding and polishing one side of the bead to produce a so-called plano-convex lens.

Since the lens defects scale with the size of the lens, it has always been a principle of microscope design that small lenses are used. Unfortunately, we had to abandon this principle in order to make our lens with a high cone angle and large area coverage: our lens had to be a giant.