MicrobeHunter.com Microscopy Forum

I this is the youngest vintage microscope in my collection, a circa 1932 Spencer Buffalo Stereo Microscope, possibly model 55. Still researching it. It was used for many years in a food plant microbiology quality control lab. After giving it a major cleaning, I was delighted to find it was in reasonable working order.



Vintage Microscope (2) by Jared Fein, on Flickr


Vintage Microscope (1) by Jared Fein, on Flickr

Hard to beat that era of Spencer styling.

There were various permutations on that stand. I have had mostly the version with the articulating arm, a kind of quasi boom stand. One of the neat applications is to rotate the column to horizontal. Formatted in such a way those scopes make a good low power microscope for l.w.d. viewing through an aquarium wall . They also produced a water immersion objective pair for it.

The stereo microscopes with the 23.2mm eyepieces were the student scopes. Spencer, also had a line with very large eyepieces around 1 5/8" , which gave wide stereo fields.
By the end of the war they had obtained as wide fields with 23.2 mm ocular tubes and those big eyepieces were discontinued, as were the student scopes, in favour of the 23-28 series.

Thanks for the additional info. This microscope was built like a tank and judging how I found it, was up to the challenge. It was used in a fish packing plant in their microbiology test lab for many years, well before when I acquired it. A lot of the construction appears to be brass which unfortunately was painted black at the time of manufacture.