Joseph Jackson Lister, FRS (11 January 1786 - 24 October 1869) was an amateur British opticist and physicist and the father of Joseph Lister. J. J. Lister was deeply interested in natural history, and realised that the microscopes available in the early 19th century did not provide adequate resolution to reveal the structure of plant cells and animal cells in sufficient detail. He therefore set about to design and construct achromatic lenses of superior performance, combining lenses of crown and flint glasses of different dispersion, in order to cancel chromatic aberration, showing that spherical aberration could be minimised by the correct separation of the lens combinations, which led to the perfection of the optical microscope. Read more