The outstanding Dutch scientist and the founding father of microbiology, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was born on October 24, 1632 in Delft, Holland. His father was a respected basket maker while his mother’s family were brewers. Father died early and so mother sent Antony to a school preparing the boy for a bureaucratic career.  At 15 Antony dropped out and headed to Amsterdam where he was apprenticed in a linen-draper’s shop.  Six years later he returned to Delft, got married and set himself up in business as a draper (a fabric merchant). What happened during the next 20 years we really do not know much about, save for the fact that he fathered several children most of whom died at an early age.  After his wife’s death Leeuwenhoek, now a chamberlain of Delft, married again spending his free hours growing flowers and breeding exotic birds.  And it was about that same time that he learned to grind lenses. Being an extremely persistent man, he made sure his lenses were in no way inferior to the ones crafted by the country’s very best lens-makers. He would set them in small frames made of brass, silver and gold he himself manufactured in his smoke-filled workshop.

Leeuwenhoek is known to have made hundreds of microscopes whose tiny lentil-shaped lenses boasted magnifying power of 100 and even 300 times. To make observations, however, one needed both expertise and patience. When exactly Leeuwenhoek began his observations we do not know. A well established man, he had no particular desire to make any discoveries seeing the microscope as just a favorite plaything. In 1673 Leeuwenhoek began writing letters to the newly-formed Royal Society of London describing what he had observed with his microscopes. For the next fifty years he corresponded with the Royal Society and personally with scientific luminaries of his day like Christian Huygens, Gottfried Leibnitz and Robert Boyle. Those were voluminous missives filled with criticism of neighbors, denunciations of charlatans and reports about his health and domestic affairs. And also of amazing discoveries he had made with the help of his microscope. Initially suspicious of Leeuwenhoek’s reports, the members of the Royal Society decided to thoroughly check the information he was sending them. And check out they did only to prove the impeccability and veracity of Leeuwenhoek’s information. 

Leeuwenhoek soon became famous as his letters were published and translated and on February 8, 1680 he was elected a full member of the Royal Society in London which sent down a beautiful membership diploma enclosed in a silver box with a coat of arms gracing its lid. Leeuwenhoek regularly corresponded with the Royal Society until the last days of his life. Even on his deathbed, unable to move, he asked a friend to translate into Latin his last letters and mail them to London... 

Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a man of many interests. Trying to find out the mystery of the tongue irritating pepper, he made a pepper potion. Two weeks later he put a drop of that potion under his microscope and was literally blown away by what he saw! The gadget was teeming with tiny living creatures who were running into one another and fanning out like ants in an anthill. In a letter to the Royal Society in London Leeuwenhoek described them as “animacules”. Putting all other things aside, Leeuwenhoek started searching for microorganisms finding them literally everywhere: in putrid water, in ditches and even on his very own teeth… In a letter to the Royal Society, he wrote, “Even though I’m 50 I still have good teeth because I regularly clean them each morning with salt.” Rubbing off some plaque between his teeth, Leeuwenhoek mixed it with rainwater and put it under the microscope. Looking at the samples he found “an unbelievably great company of living animacules, probably more than in the whole of the United Kingdom, a-swimming more nimbly than any I had ever seen before. The biggest sort… bent their body into curves in going forwards… Leeuwenhoek enclosed his own drawings of those creepy crawlers. Those were among the first observations of living bacteria ever recorded.  Boiling the water these animacules lived in he found out that they stopped moving, as if dying and never came alive after the water cooled.  Leeuwenhoek could hardly imagine then that one day those animacules would be studied by a science he fathered, something we now call microbiology…

Antony van Leeuwenhoek studied the microorganism the rest of his life. When, after the scientist’s death in 1723, they opened his will, they found out that Leeuwenhoek had bequeathed all his 26 microscopes to the Royal Society in London. To this very day people keep wondering how, using such extremely simple microscopes as he had, was this man able to see details we can’s see even looking at them though a magnifying glass? 

10/24/2005