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Handout 1.7
The discovery of cells
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During the 1660s an English naturalist called Robert Hooke designed a
microscope. It was not unlike simple school microscopes that we use today
and relied on sunlight to illuminate the image.
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In 1665 Hooke made a fortuitous observation while looking at a thin slice of
cork. He saw something that he described as ‘looking like a honeycomb with a
great many little boxes’.
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Hooke called these boxes cells from the Latin for ‘little room’.
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This was the first time that anyone realised that living things are not necessarily
made of continuous material. People thought that the skin was made of a
uniform substance and had no idea that it was made of much smaller
constituent parts. The discovery caused great excitement in the scientific
community.
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The word cell has survived to this day and has become a fundamental part of
biologists’ language.
Cells are often described as ‘the units of life’ or ‘the building blocks of life’. These
descriptions are very useful because they emphasise that these structural units
build together to form all living organisms.
1 | Strengthening teaching and learning of cells | Notes for participants
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