Donna Payette, age 10, of Portland, Maine, for her question:
Who first discovered cells?
These, of course, are the living cells that are built together to form all the different plants and animals. They are so tiny that our eyes are not sharp enough to see them. So naturally they could not be discovered until after the microscope was invented. This happened around 1590. You would think that living cells were discovered right away. But it was 75 years before someone saw them and pointed them out to the world of science.
Way back in the 1600s, scientists usually made their own microscopes. They shaped and polished glass lenses and set them in place, just so. Those who used the finest glass and ground the finest lenses made the best microscopes. But none of these early magnifiers were very strong. Besides, they revealed a strange new microscopic world. Nobody had ever seen such tiny shapes and forms before. No wonder it took the scientists a long time to make head or tail of what they saw.
In those days, the most famous microscope expert was Robert Hooke of London. He kept careful notes of what he saw and swapped them with other experts, no doubt hoping that the miniature puzzles could be solved by teamwork. No doubt many experts saw cells in their magnified samples. But for a long time, nobody seemed to notice them. Then Robert Hooke studied a sliver of cork under his microscope. He saw that it was made of tiny empty boxes, stacked close together, wall to wall.
This was way back in the year 1665, more than 300 years ago. In those days, nobody took photographs of what a microscope revealed. Instead, they drew pictures of what they saw. Robert Hooke drew a careful picture of the neat little boxes in that sliver of cork. He called them cells, perhaps because they reminded him of the neat cells in a honeycomb. And naturally he wrote a paper describing his discovery to other experts of his day.
At that time, the cell unit seemed like just another odd shape in the strange microscopic world. Nobody suspected that all plants and animals are built from various cells, or that the cell is the basic unit of life. This idea grew gradually through the next century, as microscopes improved and more samples were studied and compared. Meantime, Gregor Mendel of Austria demonstrated the laws of heredity. This and other studies suggested that the secrets of life itself are in the core of the living cell. * * ~„ (MORE)
Robert Hooke was the first to discover cells and to draw pictures of them. But it took many generations of scientists to understand the importance of his discovery. In fact, here we are 300 years later and modern scientists still cannot explain all the secrets of the living cell. But all over the world, teams of researchers are probing deeper. More and more secrets are revealed and, who knows, someday we may know everything about the most marvelous discovery that Robert Hooke made, more than 300 years ago.