The microscope has been a great boon to the scientific community ever since its creation. Its invention let scientists examine the world on a scale they'd never been able to before, magnifying things too small to be seen with the naked eye. The microscope gave us the power to see the tiniest forms of life on our own planet, and to look deeper into things brought back from other places.
Purpose
The purpose of a microscope is to magnify an object, which often cannot be seen without a microscope, so that it can be seen with the naked eye. In the same vein, larger objects may be viewed through a microscope so that fine details may be examined.
Stereoscopic Microscope
A variety of microscopes have been developed to serve different purposes. A stereoscopic microscope for instance is a setup of two, low powered microscopes that focus on a single object. The result is that a full, 3-D representation of the specimen is created, and can be examined from all angles at once.
Dark-Field
A dark-filed microscope is a variation of the basic microscope. A dark-filed This microscope uses a hollow but extremely intense cone of light to bring the specimen into view. The lens that the viewer looks through rests in the dark portion of the microscope, and picks up only the scattered light from the object. As such, clear portions are very dark, whereas minute objects will glow brightly. This type of microscope is most often used to view unstained, biological specimens.
Electron Microscopes
More advanced than microscopes that use visible light, electron microscopes use electrons to "illuminate" an object. Electrons in a vacuum are fired at the object to be magnified, and through the use of magnetic fields acting as lenses, an image of the object can be created and interpreted. Electron microscopes can magnify something up to one million times its size.
Uses
Chemists and biologists use microscopes to view the chemical reactions that take place on a scale too small for the human eye to witness unaided. Crime scene technicians use microscopes to view the rifling grooves on bullets fired in ballistics tests. And doctors use microscopes to view medical samples taken from patients to help diagnose illnesses.
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