It was a variation of a technique Hooke had earlier described in Micrographia, which predated van Leeuwenhoek's instruments, so the draper would have been familiar with the basic principle.

In 1665, nearly a decade before Leeuwenhoek published his letter describing animalcules in water, Robert Hooke, an English scientist and polymath, had also seen cells—although not live ones ...

Regardless, Hooke’s skillful illustrations were mind-boggling at the time, and the publication of Micrographia sparked interest in the construction of better lenses. It was around this time — in 1671, ...

But no one had yet seen anything like the wonders Van Leeuwenhoek reported. His results were impressive, but many – including Hooke – were skeptical of observations that nobody else could repeat.

Perhaps Hooke's greatest contribution to science was in the field of biology. Hooke, along with Leeuwenhoek, was the first to construct a practical microscope and use it to study nature. Peering at ...

In 1665—only a few years before Van Leeuwenhoek peered through his first lens—microscopes emerged into the public consciousness when the polymath Robert Hooke published his surprise bestseller ...

Robert Hooke, Micrographia / Wikimedia Commons In 1676, Dutch cloth merchant-turned-scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek further improved the microscope with the intent of looking at the cloth that ...

He says some of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify things more than 200 times. And contemporaries, like Robert Hooke in England, who’d written a book full of microscopic observations ...

Hooke used a compound microscope to create the famous sketches in his tome "Micrographia," published in 1665. Dutch draper and microscope maker Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was also instrumental ...

Hooke was the first to record cells, seen in thin slices of cork, while Leeuwenhoek described tiny 'animalcules', invisible to the naked eye, in rain water in 1676. On supporting science journalism ...

After seeing Hooke's illustrated and very popular book Micrographia, van Leeuwenhoek learned to grind lenses some time before 1668, and he began building simple microscopes. This jack-of-all ...