In the early history, there were two microscopes are made: The Simple and Compound Microscopes. The compound microscopes was discover during the late 16th century in Holland, by Zacharias Janssen and his father they discovered that using two lenses to greatly aided in magnification. It uses two lenses -an objective and an eyepiece lens. Chromatic and Spherical aberrations in the lens are the problems in compound microscope at that time, which gave a single lens microscope an advantage both in clarity and magnifying power. However, this problem is resolved by the year 19th century. Microscopes until that time had been designed based on experience and the creation had no scientific grounds. In the year 1840-1905 a German named Ernst Abbe, established a method to design microscopes utilizing logical calculations.

Then, that year the microscope design has progressed rapidly up to now a days, with a wide array of advanced microscopes now available depending on specimen and research purpose. During the year 1632 to 1723 Single lens microscopes, of which this antique created by Leeuwenhoek- is an example, use only a single lens microscope to magnify the specimen. Microscopist of early times uses simple microscopes as their option because their image was generally superior due to their simpler design. Although, compound microscopes have undergone a remarkable evolution reaching a practically perfect performance, the same didn’t seem to have happened with simple microscopes as they have being gradually abandoned ever since the compound pieces have surpassed them in quality near two centuries ago.
In developing the optics of simple microscope, to reach the high level of performance of simple microscopes they started to use from a scratch, and done different searching. The first reference was GLASS SPHERE MICROSCOPE from Giorgio Carboni. He makes research to this issue teaching how glass spheres can be made and used to create simple microscopes. Many of the authors teach and discuss the use of an algorithm to calculate lens apertures in order to optimize the resolution. They introduce a table where lists of ball lenses varying from 0.5 mm up to 9.0 mm are related to their optimal aperture and the corresponding resolution in microns. One discovered that ball lenses when properly optimized with the right lens stop aperture can yield highly resolved images up to 250 times magnification. When the lens is stop added the balls become smaller and smaller, then the resulting image will be affected by diffraction due to the minute dimensions of the pin hole used as aperture. Although, greater magnifications can be achieved, no further increase of resolution will be possible limiting the efficacy of the simple microscope. In other words, as the magnification power surpasses 250 times there will be no further increase in the ability of the lens to supply more information about finer structures and this is called empty magnification. Ball lenses have a geometry that doesn’t permit them to be combined forming compounds systems so, it will not be necessary to use this type of lenses.