This microscope is a projection microscope and is the most modern microscope on the tour. As its name suggests, it is a microscope that projects an image of the specimen being examined onto a screen. It was made by the same company as the Petrological Microscope, the Ernst Leitz Company of Wetzlar, Germany.
The leftmost section of the device contains a metal-halide light source that is reflected up underneath the specimen. Similar to previous compound microscopes on this tour, the light then passes through an objective lens and is magnified. Then, instead of passing through to an eyepiece, the image is magnified by a projecting lens which can be seen at the rightmost end of the device. This image this then projected onto a screen. This forms a highly enlarged image that may be viewed by multiple people at once. Only the right-most lens of this projection microscope is actually capable of projecting an image. The remaining three objective lenses with a magnification of x6, x13 and x40 are viewed using the eyepiece situated above the rack of objective lenses. Once the desired image is in focus, the user can slide the projection lens into place and the image will be projected to the right of the microscope. Three coloured pieces of glass may be also be inserted into the path of the halide lamp, allowing for specific wavelengths of light to be filtered from the final image.
This type of microscope is most useful in educational settings where a teacher could prepare a slide to show to a classroom or lecture hall. The benefit of having a projection microscope is that, unlike compound microscopes that only allow for a single student to observe a specimen at a time, projection microscopes allow the teacher to point out observations and key points of interest to everyone at once. This kind of microscope was used mainly in microbiology and histology.
This item is part of the UQ Physics Museum Microscopes Tour
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