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Lister's 1826 Microscope
From: Science Museum
| By:
Jane Insley |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In 1826 Joseph Jackson Lister (1786-1829) produced a microscope--one of the most important ever made. Incorporating various technical advancements, this microscope allowed scientists to view the true appearance of tissues, blood corpuscles and muscle fibres for the first time. Jane Insley, curator of Environmental Sciences at the Science Museum, tells the story of the man who invented a way to see things differently. |
 t has been suggested that Lister's 1826 microscope is the most important optical microscope ever made.  It was designed by Joseph Jackson Lister (1786-1869), father of the famous surgeon Joseph Lister, in March 1826, and made by William Tulley, the London optical instrument maker. It included such improvements as graduated draw tubes (to make it easier to set up and focus), lenses to act as a sub-stage condenser (increasing the amount of light going through the microscope slide), and a rotating and clamping stage to manipulate the slide. Its main significance rests on the superb quality of the objective lens (the one nearest the specimen), from which distortions and colour change effects had been eliminated to a greater degree than ever before. |
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| Joseph Jackson Lister, 1786-1869. | |
Joseph Jackson Lister's interest in optical matters can be traced back to his schooldays, and during the rest of his life he designed and tested lenses and other microscopical equipment. Despite being a superior student in schools at Hitchin, Rochester and finally Compton in Somerset, Joseph Jackson left formal education at the age of 14 to join his father's wine business. His own talents and his father's generosity were demonstrated four years later, when in 1804 he became a fully-fledged partner. In 1821 he became part owner of a ship commanded by his brother-in-law, and this and other business interests continued throughout his life, underpinning his scientific and religious activities. |
He was an active and influential Quaker and became a school visitor and trustee. It was through his educational activities that he met his wife Isabella, who taught reading and writing until the day of her marriage. |
Joseph Jackson was elected to fellowship of the Royal Society in 1832, on the strength of his work in microscopy and histology (the study of tissues). Of his seven children, only his son Joseph was to reach or surpass his position; the oldest son John died of a brain tumour in 1846 at the age of 24. In those days it was quite unusual for all the children in a family to reach adulthood, and Joseph Jackson never lost sight of the wider world of suffering. In 1848 he not only served on a committee to raise funds for the relief of Irish potato famine victims but took the trouble to visit them to discover for himself the conditions under which they were living. |
As a result of Lister's developments in lens design, the true appearance of tissues could be accurately described for the first time. Blood corpuscles were seen to be concave discs rather than globules, and muscle was shown to be made of fibres, with cross striations, irrespective of the source of the muscle. In the spring of 1827, Dr Thomas Hodgkin published jointly with Lister the results of these and many other observations on nerves, arteries, cellular membranes and the brain, refuting the views of some of the most eminent researchers of the time. |
Lister published his further work on objective lenses in 1830, in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and established the compound microscope (one with two main lenses) as a serious research instrument for the first time. He also continued to use it himself, and from the end of 1830 was making his own lenses, despite having no previous experience. His own research interests extended into investigations of the limits to human vision, and another paper on zoophytes (microscopic animals) illustrated by his own drawings from the camera lucida, an attachment which allows the microscopist to view both the specimen through the microscope and a sketch pad alongside at the same time, so outlines can be 'traced' directly on to the paper. |
He continued to take an interest in the design of the microscope, advising the London makers Andrew Ross, and later, James Smith, on elements of lens design. With both these men the association was long and commercially invaluable, some of Lister's improvements being widely adopted as standard. |
Because of his naturally diffident nature, much of Lister's work was never published under his own name. The full width of his many interests has only recently begun to come to light with a detailed study of his drawings, many of which were given to the Royal Microscopical Society on the death of his son Joseph, and the true significance of his work can now be more widely appreciated. |
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