Brass screw barrel microscope with several lenses, ivory handle, six ivory slides, and wooden box covered with dark fish skin. James Wilson, an optical instrument maker in London, described the form in 1702. He did not make the first instruments of this sort, and never claimed to, but the form was often associated with him.
Ref: James Wilson, “The Description and Manner of Using a Late Invented Set of Small Pocket-Microscopes, Made by James Wilson,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 23 (1702): 1241-1247.
Reginald Clay and Thomas Court, The History of the Microscope (London, 1932), pp. 44-50.
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