Discovery | A Brief History of the Microscope
Amoeba was first called "Proteus animalcule", after a Greek God who could transform his shape. Bery St. Vincent gave it the name "amibe" from the Greek word amoibe, meaning change.
The first person to discover the Amoeba was Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), of Holland. Leeuwenhoek was known as the "father of microscopy". Other biological discoveries include bacteria, yeast plants, other forms of life found in a drop of water bellanimalcules and spermatoza), and the circulation of blood corpuscles found in capillaries.
Without the invention of the microscope, the discovery of the amoeba along with many other single-celled organisms would have been very difficult. Glass was invented by the Romans in the 100 AD. They began to notice that you can use different shapes of glass to see a distorted and enlargened image of the object on the opposite side. They also noticed that you could focus the intensity of sunlight to create a fire.
The word lens comes from the latin word lentil because the glass was shaped like the bean. These lenses weren't used until the end of the 13th century when they were worn as spectacles. Early Microscopes typically only had a zoom aspect of around 6X to 10X. Good for observing fleas and other small insects.
Around the year 1590, Zaccharias Janssen and his father dropped several lenses into a tube and noticed that this would amplify the zoom ratio.
Followed by Galileo, who began improving his own version of the microscope as well as the telescope.
Finally, Anthony Leeuwenhoek improved the lenses even more by grinding and polishing the lenses. This produced even greater magnification, up to 270X. Leeuwenhoek constructed about 400 microscopes in his lifetime.
"I now saw very plainly that these were little eels, or worms, lying all huddled up together and wriggling just as if you saw, with the naked eye, a whole tubful of very little eels and water, with the eels squirming among one another; and the whole water seemed to be alive with these multifarious animalcules. This was for me, among all the marvels that I have discovered in nature, the most marvelous of all; and I must say, for my part, that no more pleasant sight has every yet come before my eyes that these many thousand of living creatures seen all alive in a little drop of water, moving among one another, each several creature having its own proper motion."
-Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
October 9, 1678 in a letter to the Royal Society.