Critical Focus | What Could the First Microscopists See?
THE MICROSCOPE
2024, Volume 71:2, pp. 84–95
DOI
https://doi.org/10.59082/KQVK8045
AUTHOR
Brian J. Ford
EXCERPT
We all remember key dates. Top of the list? It’s July 4, 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed so the U.S. became a nation in its own right and set the time for a huge annual party of fun, feasting, and fireworks. Here’s another for you: September 7, 1674. It’s the day science met the microbe. On that date, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the draper of Delft, penned a letter to London. He told how he’d recently returned from a trip by boat across a nearby lake and had collected a small glass bottle of the greenish growths that he saw in the water. Leeuwenhoek had been experimenting with home-made single-lensed microscopes and had taken a close look at his lakewater samples. What he saw revolutionized the world of science, for he was astonished to see a myriad tiny microbes swimming about. In that instant, our modern era of bioscience was born. Yet (to quote cell biologist Nick Lane in a recent video for the Royal Society) scientists still do not know what Leeuwenhoek saw. After reading this article, they will.
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