Hugh Powell (1799-1883) produced microscopes under his own name from 1840, joining Peter Lealand in partnership in 1842. The Powell & Lealand mark ensured that the microscope bearing it was by the finest maker in the world for the rest of the nineteenth century. The instrument described here is the earliest pattern, examples of which are at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Royal Microscopical Society Collection, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge. This design was superseded by a large model in 1841, and in 1843 by the design that is so famous.

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) began his zoological studies while working in the whaling industry in Newfoundland, after which he farmed in Canada and the U.S.A. He returned to England in 1839, and published the following year The Canadian Naturalist. Two more books were the result of a period spent in Jamaica collecting birds and insects for the British Museum. He then turned his attention to marine life, and produced a Manual of Marine Zoology, on the publication of which, in 1856, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In later life he turned his attention to rotifera and orchids. He was the author of several popular books, including Evenings at the Microscope (1859), for he used the instrument in his work throughout his life, and was an active member of the Microscopical Society of London. Hugh Powell was also a member, and the two men would certainly have known each other.

The Name of Gosse's son, Edmund William (1849-1928) is likely to be better known than his father's. Edmund Gosse was a considerable literary figure, who introduced Ibsen to the English public, wrote biography and criticism, and was himself a poet. In 1907 he published anonymously Father and Son, an account of his relationship with Philip Gosse, who was a Plymouth Brother, and brought up his son with great strictness. Edmund Gosse became Librarian of the House of Lords in 1904, and was knighted in 1925.