Wilson's design for the screw-barrel microscope was first introduced in his Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society paper of 1702. Although it is Wilson's name that is now primarily associated with the screw-barrel microscope, his paper was in fact a presentation of a design already worked out on the Continent by Nicholas Hartsoecker, a contemporary of Leeuwenhoek's. In a six-page pamphlet of 1706, Wilson included a plate showing the instrument with improvements on the original design including the threaded handle, a steel rather than a brass spring and the threaded ring for objectives on the compass microscope. He also now omitted the words "late invented", which had appeared in the original paper, but he can certainly take credit for greatly improving the design's optical performance and thus its popularity; most famously, Culpeper added a stand and various other improvements to produce his own well-known version, and Edward Scarlett similarly used the design for his fine instruments. From around 1702 Wilson is recorded as working from The Willow Tree in Cross St, Hatton Garden, London, where he made "all sorts of Dioptric and Catoptric Glasses and Tellescopes (sic), Prospects, Camera Obscuras, Magic Lanterns and Selleth the best of Spectacles and Reading Glasses" etc (Clay & Court, p.44); little is known of his activities after 1711. A similar instrument with the same unusual method of signing is in the King George III Collection at the Science Museum, London.