Happy birthday to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723), the Dutch scientist & progenitor of #microbiology known for his improvements to microscope tech. He was a draper in Delft, then a politician with an interest in lensmaking. Using his handmade #microscopes, he was 1st to observe microorganisms, which he called tiny animals, or “animalcules”. He also made pioneering microscopic observations on muscle fibres, bacteria, coffee 🧵
and blood flow in capillaries & discovered spermatozoa. His discoveries were shared with the scientific community through his correspondence with the Royal Society who published his letters.
He shared his drawings of the microscopic world he observed with others, but kept his tech innovation to himself. He was able to fashion tiny glass spheres as lenses in his simple microscope - the tinier the sphere the greater the magnification. 🧵2/
He made these spheres by placing the middle of a small rod of soda lime glass in a hot flame, then pulling the hot section apart to create two long whiskers of glass. He then placed a whisker of glass into the hot flame to make his tiny spheres. He consciously allowed people to erroneously assume he was toiling away, grinding finer & finer lenses.
He was initially reluctant to share his observations & detailed scientific illustrations, 🧵3/
lacking any formal education in science or art, but his friend Dutch physician
Reinier de Graaf convinced him to share his work with the Royal Society. He captured their attention & began a regular correspondence, writing 190 letters in his colloquial Dutch. Scientist & editor of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg learned Dutch in order to translate these letters into Latin or English. 🧵4/5
His first observations of single-celled organisms were met with skepticism, despite a track-record of excellent observations, but he was eventually vindicated & even elected to the Royal Society in February 1680.
He was famous in his day & an observer to the end. Letters sent in the last weeks of his life at age 90, detailed observations of his own rare illness, sometimes called van Leeuwenhoek’s disease. 🧵5/5