This unsigned Italian solar microscope was made sometime in the early nineteenth century. The model illustrated below was redrawn from photographs of the original microscope, which was photographed and described by Gerard Turner in his excellent catalog of microscopes from the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, Italy.

The body tube and mirror are secured to a brass plate that is fitted over the aperture in a window shutter with the mirror positioned outside to capture light rays from the sun. Covered with dyed green leather decorated in gold tooling, the body tube is fashioned from thin metal and lined with brown paper. The microscope is not equipped with a condenser lens and was probably not designed to accept one. A cap is positioned at the end of the tube to provide a narrow beam of light for experiments. Described as a heliostat in Maria L. Righini Bonelli's book Il Museo di Storia della Scienza a Firenze, the instrument is without a mechanism to follow the sun's movement.

BACK TO NINETEENTH CENTURY MICROSCOPES

Questions or comments? Send us an email.

© 1998-2022 by Michael W. Davidson and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved. No images, graphics, scripts, or applets may be reproduced or used in any manner without permission from the copyright holders. Use of this website means you agree to all of the Legal Terms and Conditions set forth by the owners.

This website is maintained by our
Graphics & Web Programming Team
in collaboration with Optical Microscopy at the
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Last modification: Friday, Nov 13, 2015 at 01:19 PM

Access Count Since October 2, 2000: 25180

For more information on microscope manufacturers,
use the buttons below to navigate to their websites: