Born in Holland in 1632, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek was a successful linen merchant. During those times Robert Hooke devoted himself to magnifying part of visible, familiar things, or what we call microscopy. He never suspected that on a still smaller scale there existed forms of life that were as yet invisible and unknown. Yes, this discovery belonged to Leeuwenhoek with the use of his microscope. With his line of business, Leeuwenhoek always had to look closely at many types of cloth fibers under the microscope, which may have led to his passion for exploring the secret universe of tiny objects and microscopy. Since making lenses was his hobby, and he lived up to the age of ninety one, this left him many years to hone his skill. He was able to grind small beads of glass or clear quartz crystal into magnifiers so powerful that experts nowadays estimate his best instruments must have enlarged things about three hundred times.

Leeuwenhoeks Microscope

This type of microscope was different than that of Hookes microscope. While the latters microscope used two lenses, Leeuwenhoek another inventor of the microscope fastened a single beadlike lens into a flat metal holder. This was his version of another early microscope. Just like Hooke, Leeuwenhoek never got tired of training his microscope on every object and substance that came his way. With his constant experiments in microscopy and microscopes, one of his discoveries with his microscope was the little green animals. This was made possible when he went boating on a lake one summer. He noticed that the waters turned cloudy just at that season every year. While people who lived around that area thought that this was caused by the heavy dew, Leeuwenhoek thought otherwise. He took a vial of the water and looked at it through his microscope. To his amazement, with the use of his microscope, he found the water to be swarming with little animals. In his famous letter to the Royal Society, he described this discovery as animalcules. When he looked at his experiment through his microscope, some of these were green, some white, others transparent or ashy grey. There were also oval shaped with tiny limbs near the head and two little fins at the rear of the body. He estimated that these creatures must be about a thousand times smaller than the smallest mites he had seen on cheese rind or in infested flour.