In 1957 Marvin Minsky patented the confocal microscope: a system that illuminates and detects a single point of the sample at a time, blocking out-of-focus light via a pinhole. The result is a cleaner image and the possibility of obtaining optical sections without physically cutting the sample — and therefore three-dimensional reconstructions. Minsky conceived the system to observe living brain tissue. Its real impact arrived decades later, when the combination of lasers, high-sensitivity detectors, and computers made point-by-point scanning viable in reasonable time. The laser confocal microscope is today a standard tool in neuroscience, cell biology, and medical imaging.