Science often grows exponentially from certain key insights, and the insight Marvin Minsky had in 1955 is no exception. While working as a postdoctoral fellow at HarvardUniversity, Minsky sought a method to reduce the high level of light scatter that made high contrast imag‐ ing of thick specimens impossible by standard light microscopy. He realized that an arrange‐ ment of lenses having conjugate focal planes (hence the term ‘confocal’), with a specimen and a pinhole placed at these opposite planes, could serve to reject the light that was scattered out- of-plane at the specimen. The result was a conceptually simple yet powerful method.
