Does the microscope achieve high enough magnification to view the ‘cell’?

“So the physicists have produced a microscope known as the Electron Microscope which does not use light rays at all but operates with cathode rays.  Instead of a beam of light it employs a stream of electrons, and electromagnets instead of lenses.”  Kenneth M. Smith, Beyond the Microscope, 1945.  

“[I]n 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of British science that the human race without exception had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century.”  The Massachusetts Historical Society, The Education of Henry Adams, An Autobiography, September 1918.

Introduction

The following is based on observations using the Prinz 2801 (a standard two-lens light microscope), the Apex Learner (some modification to the standard shape),  and the Sunagor MagnaScope (a two-part microscope consisting of a zoom and magnifier with a funnel to direct light).  Each of these are light microscopes that depend on battery or mains, mirror or natural lighting and magnifying lenses to achieve enlargement.  I have not yet had access to an electron microscope.

Although cancer was apparently diagnosed before the invention of the electron microscope  (which is not included in encyclopedia timelines on electronics, although I thought I had seen a book reference to 1948) diagnosis since at least the 1960s has relied upon the electron microscope.  What follows might therefore be thought beside the point because it is not based on observations using the electron microscope.   Until recently I had apparently also underestimated what could be seen using the light microscope because I had depended only upon the Prinz 2801 and Sunagor MagnaScope, both of which relied on natural lighting after damage, but then appeared to obtain much higher magnification with the Apex Learner.  However, the results with the initial microscopes meant I spent time observing magnification with magnifying lenses and thinking about the theoretical limits of lens magnification, so that after seeing the apparently high reflection with the Apex Learner and initially wondering why, apart from its implausibility, the electron microscope needed to be used for disease diagnosis at all, I then became sceptical about the image obtained with the Apex Learner and wondered if it, too, was an ‘electron’ microscope.  

The Prinz 2801 is a microscope from the late 1960s and mine has a corroded battery wire so could only be lit by the mirror.    However, because of the ‘red herring’ of what look like bird irises at the end of the three objective lens tubes above the slide,  I assumed for a long time that I was correct in thinking that the detailed and largely unchanging structures I saw on the screen and in layers above it, which I took to be an object within the microscope and the lens of my own eye at relatively limited magnification, were all one would see under any microscope.    This seemed more or less consistent with the limited magnification, blurring and distortions I found when using magnifying glasses and nor was it entirely undermined by seeing beyond the microscope but at fairly limited magnification with the Sunagor MagnaScope.  

However, the Apex Learner achieves surprisingly high magnifications. With the Apex Learner I appear to see a two-millimetre wide piece of transparent bronze film – the ocular lens wrappings - magnified so far by as much as 600 times –360,000 times if we think of magnification instead in terms of area, although pathologists do not.   However, it is impossible to assess the actual magnification since we are judging the width of the screen we see within the cylinder rather than an image projected onto a screen (and for this reason too it can be difficult to obtain consistent results).  However, magnification appears to reveal structures that cannot be seen by the eye alone, although with the object observed (the bronze-coloured wrapper) these appear to be a pattern of opaque and translucent (reversed if we light from below rather than above)  rather than an underlying structure.

When I obtained the higher magnifications I did not doubt that microscopes did not diagnose disease, which I have been certain of since guessing in late 2012, but was not sure how to account for it.  The telescope contains mirrors, but whether or not there are mirrors inside the microscope – and I have so far been unable to take any of them apart - these would not, from observation of what one sees , for example, if one places a mirror between two magnifying glasses,  add significantly to enlargement    Instead, I wondered first why it would have been necessary to have invented the implausible-sounding electron microscope rather than continue to use the light microscope for diagnosis of disease unless it were to discourage amateurs and then whether what was being implied by the name was not in fact beams of electrons providing illumination but that all microscopes are electron microscopes in the sense that they resemble other electronic devices that do not have a simple mechanical explanation:  the outline of the image or the object or stain itself is detected, enlarged and filled with a complex structure.   

The microscope as a diagnostic instrument