State of the art of technique and workmanship for endoscopes around 1800

Philip Bozzini

Philipp Bozzini has been a doctor and needed the cooperation with surgical engeneers which transformed his ideas into a real product called the "Lichtleiter". He suffered from the slow progress of their workmanship and that they were not willing to invest own money into this invention. No one knows who were those persons but it seems that they had been armourers and metal workers.

Ringleb, the wellknown urologist of Berlin ( 1875 - 1946) mentioned this difficulties which Bozzini had to overcome and described the qualitiy of workmanship of the "Lichtleiter" as poor. This was an error. Later on, when the engeneers of Mercedes rebuild the "Lichtleiter" by existing original drawings they admired their high quality and the precise workman ship of the Lichtleiter

State of the art 1806

To produce the Lichtleiter the following materials were used by Philipp Bozzini:
 


A container made of iron sheet and covered by a leather overlayer to place the candle inside. This kind of work has been performed by armourers and metal workers since anticity, also the use of this materials is known since these times.

Bozzini used for his invention a concave mirror. Mirrors origine also from anticity. First ones have been made of polished metal. In the middle age mirrors of glass were made by glass blowers of Venice (Murano) using tin layers placed on the back side. The French doctor Peter Borell (1620 - 1689) developed the concave mirror for magnification and better lightening of the field of examiniation inside the human body. Concave mirrors reached high importance for ENT applications.

Bozzini used a collecting lenses which he placed infront of the speculas. First optical lenses are shown in the historic museum of Visby/Sweden. They were made of rock crystal and origin from 11th century. The quality  has an uncredible standard and are comparable with lenses produced nowadays.

Lenses for microscopes have been engeneered by Hans Janssen (Netherland) in 1595 and Hans Lippershey. Also Galileo Galilei, Eustachio Divini, A.M. Schryl de Reta and Christian Huygens contributed their knowledge to the progress of lens production and microscopes development.

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek brouhgt a step forward in the kind he polished optical lenses. He produced about 500 microscopes during his life but never sold one. His lenses of 1.2 mm diameter leed to 270 times magnification of the image.

Such lenses could also be used for endoscopes. But the quality of the lenses used by Bozzini were poor.