The microscope opens a hidden world
Hooke draws a flea; Leeuwenhoek finds animals in a drop of water.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 11 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Robert Hooke's Micrographia of 1665 shows readers the compound eye of a fly and the cells of cork — his word — in engravings of startling quality. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, grinding better lenses in Delft, reports in the 1670s living organisms in pond water, saliva and his own gut, invisible to everyone before him. The existence of an entire biological realm below the threshold of sight is established, though its relevance to disease takes two more centuries.