😉 Hello dear readers! The article “Anthony Leeuwenhoek: biography, interesting facts, video” – about the life of the Dutch naturalist, designer of microscopes and the founder of scientific microscopy.
The unremarkable Dutch city of Delft became famous for the birth of Anthony van Leeuwenhoek. He lived a life of 90 years, filled with interesting discoveries.
The self-taught scientist in 1680 was honored to become a member of the Royal Society of London. Only outstanding and gifted natural scientists and doctors were admitted there. And in 1698 he was visited by the All-Russian Emperor Peter I, a champion of everything new and progressive.
Leeuwenhoek: biography
The future world famous scientist was born in the middle of autumn 1623. If you return to his childhood, it was not particularly remarkable. The family was engaged in weaving all kinds of baskets from the vine.
A family of simple artisans could not afford the luxury of giving at least some kind of education to their children. At the family council, it was decided to give his son to a neighbor, a clothier.
Due to the death of his father, the boy became independent early. When he was fifteen years old, he went to the capital to study the trade craft. But his mother dreamed that her son would become an official. In Amsterdam, he worked in a shop as an accountant and cashier.
The aspiring businessman returned to his hometown of Delft at the age of 21. He got a job as a guard of the court chamber, which combined the work of a janitor, a stoker in the winter, and a watchman.
Then he opened his shop. He devoted his free time to his favorite pastime – making lenses, in which he was very successful. In those years, the strongest lens only magnified the image 20 times.
The lenses were tiny, about the size of a fingernail, oval in shape, and mounted on a metal holder. With such simple microscopes, Levenguk managed to achieve a 300-fold increase. And before him opened a whole universe of microscopic living beings, which he called animals.
Levenguk’s microscope
Life under a microscope
It became almost impossible to tear Levenguk off the microscope. He tested pepper solution, seminal fluid, plaque from his own teeth. By the way, at the age of fifty, his teeth were safe and sound, thanks to the fact that every morning he cleaned them with salt.
Anthony Leeuwenhoek was the first to see with his own eyes various bacteria, as well as small nimble cells with tails – spermatozoa. In the blood stream, he also made out red blood cells – erythrocytes.
It turned out that in mammals they have a disc-shaped biconcave shape, and in birds with fish – oval. For half a century, he described all his scientific observations, as well as everyday life, in rather detailed letters and sent them to London.
Subsequently, these letters (about three hundred) were published in a separate book about the secrets of nature, revealed by a talented scientist with the help of microscopes made with his own hands.
Microorganisms remained the object of study of the enthusiastic researcher until his death in August 1723. In his office, about three hundred microscopes and more than one hundred and fifty lenses were found. Half of the instruments were set in silver, three in gold.
Levenguk was the first living on Earth to see the kingdom of microorganisms and introduce them to humanity. For half a century, Levenguk managed to discover more than two hundred tiny organisms.
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