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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.

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Melvyn Bragg

Jim Bennett

Colin Humphreys

Michelle Peckham

Thomas Morris

In Our Time: The Microscope

In Our Time microscopes 281113

28/11/2013

The Microscope

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Microscope

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the development of the microscope.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the microscope, from its invention in the 17th century to the latest sophisticated imaging techniques.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the development of the microscope, an instrument which has revolutionised our knowledge of the world and the organisms that inhabit it. In the seventeenth century the pioneering work of two scientists, the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke in England, revealed the teeming microscopic world that exists at scales beyond the capabilities of the naked eye. 

The microscope became an essential component of scientific enquiry by the nineteenth century, but in the 1930s a German physicist, Ernst Ruska, discovered that by using a beam of electrons he could view structures much tinier than was possible using visible light. Today light and electron microscopy are among the most powerful tools at the disposal of modern science, and new techniques are still being developed.

With:

Jim Bennett
Visiting Keeper at the Science Museum in London

Sir Colin Humphreys
Professor of Materials Science and Director of Research at the University of Cambridge

Michelle Peckham
Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Leeds

Producer: Thomas Morris.

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