James Baquet

    Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was not a “scientist” in the modern sense. In fact, the idea of a professional wearing a white coat and working in a sterile laboratory is something very recent indeed.

    Instead, van Leeuwenhoek (say “vahn LAY-vuhn-hook) was a tradesman — a draper and, later, a land surveyor (one of the many jobs he held in the civil service of Delft, the city where he spent most of his life).

    As a draper, he needed to examine closely the threads in his materials, and found his magnifying glasses inadequate, so he began experimenting with making lenses.

    The first known microscopes had been made in the Netherlands around a decade before van Leeuwenhoek’s birth. But he refined the making of lenses to the point where he was the first to report seeing single-celled organisms, which he called “animalcules,” from the Latin for “little animals.” Because of this, he is sometimes called the “Father of Microbiology.”

    Aside from this, he made a great many other discoveries, including observations of muscle fibers and circulating blood (in the capillaries).

    Despite his success — and the attendant fame — van Leeuwenhoek never wrote a book. He did carry on voluminous correspondence with the Royal Society in London, comprising about 560 letters. These remain a primary source for scholars today.

    (The Royal Society at that time was called “the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.” Although “science” is merely a form of the Latin word for “knowledge,” it was not used as the name of a specific academic discipline until around 1725--about the time van Leeuwenhoek died. In his time what we call “science” was a form of philosophy.)

    Van Leeuwenhoek kept his techniques a secret, which gave him a virtual monopoly on certain types of discovery. While the technology of microscope construction has advanced considerably, it wasn’t until the 1950s that the techniques he used in lens making were rediscovered.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. employment by the government;

    2. the smallest blood vessels, which connect arteries with veins;

    3. free of germs;

    4. living things;

    5. person who does some skilled manual work;

    6. control over an entire technology, service, etc.;

    7. coming along with;

    8. of great size or extent;

    9. hand-held lenses used to examine things closely;

    10. person who sells cloth