Discovery of the Cell

A scientist named Robert Hooke was thee first person to use the term cells to refer to the tiny structures found in organisms. Around 1665, Hooke observed a piece of cork with the use of a microscope which he himself made. There he observed boxlike compartments in the cork. Hooke thought they looked like the small rooms or cells of old monasteries. He called these room-like structures in cork, cells. What Hooke really saw were the outer boundaries of the cells. They looked like empty boxes because the cells were dead.

Many other Scientists studied cells. In 1831 Robert Brown reported seeing small bodies in the cells he studied and called them nuclei (singular from nucleus) Years late in 1839, Johannes Purkinjie observed the complex fluid inside the cells and named it protoplasm.