1588-c. 1628

Dutch Optician

Sacharias Jansen is generally credited with inventing the first compound microscope and may possibly have invented the telescope. A traveling merchant as well as optician, Jansen was a bit of a rogue, involved as he was in various counterfeiting schemes.

Jansen was born in 1588 in The Hague, Netherlands. His father, Hans, was a lens grinder based in Middelburg, the flourishing capital of Zeeland. Hans died four years after his son's birth, and Sacharias's mother taught her son the skills necessary for managing the family business. Jansen married in 1610, and his son Johannes Sachariassen was born the next year.

It is generally believed that Jansen built the first compound microscope around 1595. Since Sacharias was so young at the time it may have been Hans who actually invented the device, with his son merely having assumed production after his father's death. Jansen's first microscopes had...