Antoni van Leeuwenhoek had what some might consider an unusual hobby for a Dutch cloth merchant in the 17th century: making simple but exquisite microscopes. His hometown of Delft in the ...

Leeuwenhoek constructed about 500 microscopes in his lifetime, and he had a variety on hand at any given moment to suit the purpose of what he was examining. The instruments themselves were relatively ...

They are simple enough to create that they ... was solved in the early 19th century, single-lens microscopes like Van Leeuwenhoek’s could achieve far superior results. Hooke was aware of ...

Ford says the pictures are the first to do justice to the clarity of images available with Leeuwenhoek microscopes. But he admits the devices are difficult and fiddly to use. A simple yet ...

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 ...

While compound microscopes were still in development, Leeuwenhoek used simple microscopes equipped with a single high-quality lens. Thanks to his excellent eyesight and boundless patience ...

Simple, single-lens microscopes had been in use since the early 16th century and compound microscopes, with more than one lens, were invented around 1590. Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist and ...

In the late 17th century, a Dutch draper and self-taught scientist named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek earned renown for building some of the best microscopes available at a time when the instrument ...

which drew his attention to a simple microscope that was available at the time. From there, van Leeuwenhoek went on to be the first person to identify gouty tophi, among many other discoveries.

Magnifying glasses were the preserve of a privileged few, and other optical instruments, such as simple telescopes and microscopes, were rarer still. So it’s little wonder that Leeuwenhoek was ...