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    The Diamond Lens
    The Diamond Lens
    The Diamond Lens
    Ebook41 pages33 minutes

    The Diamond Lens

    By Fitz-James O’Brien

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    About this ebook

    How I longed to discover the secret of some perfect lens, whose magnifying power should be limited only by the resolvability of the object, and which at the same time should be free from spherical and chromatic aberrations, in short from all the obstacles over which the poor microscopist finds himself continually stumbling!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateOct 19, 2016
    ISBN9781682995310
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    • 4/5
      Young man fascinated by microscopy will stop a nothing to build the most powerful microscope in existence. But when he does, he sees much more than he bargained for. Very well done, in a florid 19th century sort of way.

    Book preview

    The Diamond Lens - Fitz-James O’Brien

    The Diamond Lens

    by Fitz-James O’Brien

    Start Publishing LLC

    Copyright © 2015 by Start Publishing LLC

    All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

    First Start Publishing eBook edition July 2015

    Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    ISBN 13: 978-1-68299-531-0

    Table of Contents

    1. The Bending of the Twig

    2. The Longing of a Man of Science

    3. The Spirit of Leeuwenhoek

    4. The Eye of Morning

    5. Animula

    6. The Spilling of the Cup

    The Diamond Lens

    by Fitz-James O’Brien

    1. The Bending of the Twig

    From a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been towards microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me, by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole, in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

    Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes, that intervened between that promise and his departure.

    Meantime I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest resemblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon, and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument, the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as bull’s eyes were ruthlessly destroyed, in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvelous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha’s spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties—in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

    At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field’s simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could

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