Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Who Found A World In A Drop Of Water · Draper & Microscopist · 1632–1723

The Delft draper who ground better lenses than anyone in Europe and found a living world in a drop of water that nobody had known was there.

Who was Leeuwenhoek?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was born in Delft in 1632 and trained as a draper. He had no university education, no Latin and no Greek, and for most of his life he made his living selling cloth and holding minor civic offices — chamberlain to the sheriffs, surveyor, wine-gauger. He learned to grind lenses in order to count the threads in fabric, and became extraordinarily good at it: not the compound microscopes the learned used, which magnified perhaps thirty times, but single tiny beads of glass mounted in a brass plate and held close to the eye, reaching two or three hundred times. From 1673 he sent his observations to the Royal Society in London, in Dutch, because he could write in nothing else — nearly two hundred letters over half a century. In 1674 he examined water from a nearby lake and found in it creatures moving about, which he called animalcules; he found them again in rainwater, in an infusion of pepper, and in the scrapings from between his own teeth, where he noted they stopped moving after he drank hot coffee. He described red blood corpuscles, the fine vessels linking arteries to veins in a tadpole's tail, the striations of muscle, spermatozoa and yeast. The Royal Society did not believe the animalcules and set Robert Hooke to repeat the work; Hooke eventually confirmed it, and Leeuwenhoek was elected a Fellow in 1680. He never sold a lens, never took a pupil, and never disclosed his best method of making them. He died in Delft in 1723, still sending letters.

Major achievements

• Ground single-lens microscopes reaching magnifications no contemporary instrument approached
• Discovered micro-organisms — his 'animalcules' — in lake water in 1674
• Found them in rainwater, in pepper infusions and in the plaque from his own teeth
• Described red blood corpuscles and the capillaries joining arteries to veins
• Described spermatozoa, muscle fibres and yeast

Life in brief

• 1632 — Born in Delft: The son of a basket-maker, in the same town and year as Vermeer.
• 1654 — Sets up as a draper: And begins grinding lenses to count threads in cloth.
• 1673 — First letter to London: Sent to the Royal Society by de Graaf, written in Dutch.
• 1674 — The animalcules: Creatures moving in a drop of lake water, seen for the first time.
• 1676 — Disbelieved: The Royal Society doubts him and sets Hooke to repeat the work.
• 1680 — Elected a Fellow: After Hooke confirms the observations.
• 1723 — Dies in Delft: Still writing letters, and still not telling anyone how he made the lenses.

Explore the life of Leeuwenhoek — five chapters

1. Counting Threads — A tradesman's reason for grinding glass
2. A Bead of Glass in a Brass Plate — Why his instruments beat everybody's
3. A World in a Drop of Water — 1674, and the first sight of micro-organisms
4. Corpuscles, Capillaries and Sperm — Fifty years of looking at everything
5. No Pupil, No Theory, No Successor — What one man's eyes cannot do

Read the five-chapter life of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek →

Where Leeuwenhoek appears in your course

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek has a genuine claim on 2 lessons of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE science course built into Incandio:

• Levels of Organisation — Biology: Hooke saw empty boxes in dead cork. Leeuwenhoek, a draper in Delft with lenses ten times better than anyone else's, looked into pond water in 1674 and found things moving in it — and later found red blood corpuscles, and the tiny vessels joining arteries to veins. He saw the living contents this page describes, two centuries before anyone could say what they were.
• Blood — Biology: In 1674 Leeuwenhoek looked at blood through lenses he had ground himself and found that it is not a red liquid at all but a clear fluid crowded with countless small red bodies. He estimated their size with remarkable accuracy and watched them pass single file through vessels finer than a hair, bending to get through — the flexibility this lesson explains. What he could never say was what any of them was for; he supposed the red bodies were simply a colouring matter.

Begin

• Start a conversation with Leeuwenhoek — a dramatised, historically grounded AI portrayal
• Read the Historical Brief
• Explore the life of Leeuwenhoek — five chapters
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