A Brief History of Creation

by Bill Mesler

  WHEN HE TURNED SIXTEEN, van Leeuwenhoek’s stepfather passed away. His mother shipped him off yet again, this time to the port city of Amsterdam to learn a trade. The city was teeming with new arrivals, from abroad and from the countryside. The Netherlands was fast becoming an urban country, and Amsterdam, a great metropolis of its time. Van Leeuwenhoek took a job as an apprentice in a linen draper’s shop, rising to the position of clerk and cashier, and learning the basics of the trade that would be his career for the rest of his life. It was probably then that he was first exposed to a simple microscope, the device for which his name would eventually become synonymous among learned people everywhere.

  Simple lenses had been around since at least as far back as the first century AD. Emperor Nero’s tutor Seneca the Younger noted that “letters, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe or glass filled with water.” But it is hard to say when someone first realized that the lens-grinding process could be used to create what would qualify as a microscope. The Italian poet Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai, who lived at the end of the fifteenth century and was a cousin to Pope Leo X, used a concave mirror to study bees. His observations became the basis for his most famous poem, Le Api (“The Bees”).

  Galileo had built one of the earliest compound microscopes, which he called his occhiolino, his “little eye.” By stacking multiple lenses, he could produce a more powerful magnification. The term “microscope” was coined by Galileo’s friend, the German botanist Giovanni Faber, who derived it from the Greek words scopia (“to see”) and micro (“small”). Not long before Galileo, a pair of Dutch eyeglass makers named Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Janssen had both claimed to have invented the microscope. Both men also claimed to have invented the telescope. Fierce competitors who lived next door to each other, each insisted the other had stolen the idea for the devices. Neither claim ever had much merit. They were simply likely the first to try to patent such devices.

  By van Leeuwenhoek’s time, lens making was all the rage in Holland, and even Baruch Spinoza earned his living as a lens grinder. The most valuable lenses were used to make telescopes, since they could be used to navigate at sea and had important military applications. But there was a market for lenses that could see small things as well, particularly for those, like van Leeuwenhoek, in the textile trade. These were little more than what would later be known as magnifying glasses, but they could be used to accurately gauge the quality of cloth, and to closely examine the technique and skill of needlework.

  In 1665, interest in microscopy was kindled by the publication of a marvelous book entitled Micrographia. Its author was an Englishman by the name of Robert Hooke, assistant to the famous Irish chemist and inventor Robert Boyle. As well as being a brilliant investigator of the natural world, Hooke was a gifted artist, and the book was filled with fabulous illustrations. These gave Micrographia a wide appeal, far beyond the narrow audience of those interested in a complex book of natural philosophy. Many of his subjects were mundane objects, but to a reader in the seventeenth century, the view from the lens of Hooke’s microscope turned them into objects fantastic and magical.

  Hooke’s observations began with simple manufactured objects. Several were things a draper like van Leeuwenhoek might have chosen to observe. There were studies of the head of a needle and a piece of linen. Eventually, the book worked its way to more complex subjects, and Hooke turned his looking glass to plants, both commonplace plants like rosemary and exotic ones, like a plant brought from the East Indies called cow-itch. Finally came Hooke’s most amazing and complex examinations, those of animals. He included everything from hair and fur and feathers to parts of insects and other small organisms, like the eyes of the gray drone fly or the teeth of a snail.

  Hooke’s drawing of a flea in Micrographia.

  One of the first illustrations in Hooke’s Micrographia was a drawing of his microscope. It looked remarkably similar to an archetypical microscope design still used four centuries later, like a spyglass turned to the ground, with a small metal thimble upon which to place one’s eye. Hooke included exhaustive instructions on how he constructed his microscope, even the methods he used to blow and grind his glass lenses. The instructions were so detailed that they filled much of the first half of the book.

  BY THE TIME Micrographia appeared, van Leeuwenhoek was back in Delft, married and settled in a comfortable house in town. Soon he had built his own microscope based loosely on Hooke’s design. It lacked the beauty of Hooke’s tubular device, but van Leeuwenhoek was not completely blind to aesthetics. All of its component parts were made of copper or silver. When it came to the lens, van Leeuwenhoek made some changes to Hooke’s design. Like all the most powerful microscopes of the time, Hooke’s was a compound microscope. It had lenses stacked upon each other, each increasing the magnification of the last. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, in contrast, had but a single lens, yet he could see things that required a magnification five or six times greater than Hooke’s provided.

  Unlike Hooke, Van Leeuwenhoek was secretive about the methods he used to construct his lenses. He vowed never to share or even discuss them, and he never did, even when his secrecy threatened his own credibility. One modern observer, the artist David Hockney, has speculated that he used special techniques to increase the clarity of what he could see, including manipulating lighting or the background of his specimens. These could have been the same tricks used by many of the great Dutch painters of the period, who were masters of lighting and perspective. Hockney would also speculate that van Leeuwenhoek had been aided by something called a camera obscura—a simple box that, using light and mirrors, could project an unusually clear image that was much larger than the original, almost like a slide projector. Its design would eventually be used by the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, as the basis of the first motion picture projector.

  At least part of the reason van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes were so effective was that they were based on a single-lens design. The biggest problem with the compound microscopes of men like Hooke was that each additional lens obscured the clarity of what the observer could actually see—a phenomenon known as chromatic aberration. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, which relied on one extremely powerful lens, didn’t have that problem.

  Van Leeuwenhoek was able to see things that no other human being on Earth had ever seen. He first turned his attention to the same mundane objects he found in Hooke’s book, but saw details that Hooke had missed on the stingers and mouths of bees, and even in their eyes. He shared these discoveries with a few of his acquaintances, including Regnier de Graaf, a natural philosopher, accomplished physician, and inventor of one of the early prototypes of the hypodermic needle. De Graaf soon put van Leeuwenhoek in touch with Henry Oldenburg, an important natural philosopher in London. In the years to follow, van Leeuwenhoek would gain a reputation as the finest microscopist in the world. Oldenburg was the one who would make sure the rest of the world saw what van Leeuwenhoek had accomplished.

  One of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes.

  A GERMAN FROM BREMEN, Henry Oldenburg’s real name was Heinrich Oldenberg. He had first come to England as a diplomat but became a lifelong resident after marrying the daughter of an influential clergyman. He had a passion for the sciences. He was an early member of a small group of natural philosophers who met informally at London’s Gresham College. They eventually adopted the name of the Philosophical Society of Oxford. In 1662, probably in response to the French court’s support of a rival group of natural philosophers called the Montmor Academy, the Oxford group received a royal charter from King Charles II and became the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Better known as simply the Royal Society, it rapidly became the best-known scientific body in the world, a distinction it would hold until the twentieth century.

  The mathematician William Brouncker became its first president, and Robert Hooke was appointed curator of experiments. Oldenburg became the first secreta
ry, but that appointment would be short-lived. In 1667, Oldenburg was arrested by British authorities and locked away in the Tower of London, suspected of espionage on the basis of a letter he had written to a friend in France, a fellow natural philosopher, in which he related events in the city. It had been a time of great xenophobia in London. A Dutch fleet was threatening England with invasion, and for the first time in their lives, Londoners could hear the guns of foreign ships off their shores. The city was also undergoing a severe outbreak of the bubonic plague, the last such outbreak in its history. Over the previous two years, the disease had claimed a hundred thousand lives. To make matters worse, a huge fire had burned down nearly 80 percent of the city the previous year. The process of rebuilding was under way, under the auspices of a brilliant young architect named Christopher Wren, another of the Enlightenment luminaries who happened to be born in 1632.

  Oldenburg was released after the threat of Dutch invasion had passed. He wrote to his old friend Robert Boyle, whose children Oldenburg had once tutored, asking to be reinstated to the Royal Society and promising “faithful service to the nation to the very utmost of my abilities.” Most welcomed him back, but there was a cloud over him that never quite went away. To many Englishmen, even some of those who knew him from the Royal Society, Oldenburg’s loyalties remained in question. In later years, even Robert Hooke, suspicious of everyone and a staunch nationalist, questioned whether Oldenburg wasn’t secretly in league with the French.

  Yet Oldenburg became the organizational glue that enabled the Royal Society to establish itself as the world’s premier repository of scientific thinking. His prolific correspondence with naturalists around the world made him a human nexus of Enlightenment knowledge. But the huge volume of letters he received from abroad also worried him. His arrest had made him cautious. He began asking his correspondents to address their letters to a “Mr. Grubendol,” an anagram for “Oldenburg.”

  MICROGRAPHIA was the first major work published by the Royal Society. Originally, the project was to be completed by Christopher Wren, who was almost as accomplished a scientist as he was an architect. Citing a lack of time, he had passed the book on to Hooke. With funding from the Crown, the Royal Society also began publishing a periodical. Oldenburg became its first editor, and it didn’t take long for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to establish itself as the world’s scientific paper of record, a position it occupied for the next two hundred years.

  Many of the Philosophical Transactions’ early issues were devoted to microscopy. In 1673, the journal included a letter from Regnier de Graaf, the physician from Delft, who told of a “certain most ingenious person here named Leeuwenhoek” who had “devised microscopes which far surpass those we have hitherto seen.” The claim was greeted skeptically. Nobody had ever heard of van Leeuwenhoek. An inquiry was made to the Dutch statesman and poet Constantijn Huygens, whose son Christiaan would go on to fame as an important mathematician and astronomer. Huygens wrote that van Leeuwenhoek was a man “unlearned both in sciences and languages, but of his own nature exceedingly curious and industrious.”

  At de Graaf’s urging, van Leeuwenhoek dispatched his first letter to Oldenburg. It had all the charming reluctance and frankness that characterized his future correspondence. “I have no style, or, pen, wherewith to express my thoughts properly,” he wrote. “Besides myself, in our town there be no philosophers who practice this art.” He added a telling fact about his nature, one that he would never escape through all his future fame and success: “I do not gladly suffer contradiction or censure from others.”

  The letter included some observations of the stingers of bees and of lice, which could only have come from a microscope more powerful than Hooke’s. There were also some simple sketches. Van Leeuwenhoek didn’t have Hooke’s artistic gift and never attempted a serious drawing. Later he had pictures drawn by local artists. Sometimes he showed them a simple sketch he had made upon which to base their own work, but he described these as no more than a few simple lines on paper. As far as anyone knows, he never let the artists simply look through his microscopes. To do so would have diminished his role as translator of the microscopic world, which for many years literally he alone had access to.

  Van Leeuwenhoek’s first communication was met with skepticism. That he was a mere haberdasher only increased the incredulity. Nonetheless, Oldenburg published an edited version in the Philosophical Transactions, adding a mildly sarcastic commentary of his own. Surely, Oldenburg wrote, they hadn’t heard the last of this van Leeuwenhoek “who doubtless will proceed in making and imparting more Observations, the better to evince the goodness of these his glasses.” Oldenburg was essentially inviting the Dutchman to prove he could see all that he claimed.

  This, van Leeuwenhoek did. Over the next four decades, he dispatched some 560 letters filled with astounding scientific observations to the world’s leading institutions and journals of natural philosophy. All of these were written in his colloquial style, meandering through mundane topics even as he made astounding scientific revelations. But van Leeuwenhoek never published a book or even what might generously be called a scientific paper. He probably never adopted a style more suited to publication because he couldn’t read the foreign journals in which his work appeared. The only language he ever mastered was Dutch.

  Most of van Leeuwenhoek’s letters were directed to the Royal Society, and Henry Oldenburg became, to a large extent, his personal translator and editor. It is ironic that van Leeuwenhoek would owe so much of his initial fame to a German. Van Leeuwenhoek didn’t care for Germans, and when speaking of them, he had a habit of turning to one side and exclaiming, “Oh, what a brute!” Until his death in 1677, Oldenburg dutifully edited all of van Leeuwenhoek’s communications. Many of these were addressed to “Mr. Grubendol.”

  MOST PEOPLE in the seventeenth century had a hard time accepting the existence of things that could not be seen by the naked eye. Many of van Leeuwenhoek’s claims were initially dismissed, even by the most learned of the time. Worse, for him, was the ridicule. Some of it came from the English satirist Jonathan Swift, who liked to poke fun at scientists. Van Leeuwenhoek’s observation of parasites that fed on fleas inspired this parody by Swift:

  The vermin only tease and pinch

  Their foes superior by an inch.

  So Naturalists observe, a flea

  Has smaller fleas that on him prey,

  And these have smaller still to bite ’em

  And so proceed ad infinitum.

  Yet nothing could have prepared van Leeuwenhoek for the incredulity that would greet his first great discovery, the microscopic world he examined in Berkelse Mere. It was a landmark moment in science. No other person had ever observed the tiny creatures that would later be understood to be protozoa and bacteria. Nor would anybody see them, without van Leeuwenhoek’s personal assistance, for the rest of the century. He was the first human being to see a single-celled organism—a discovery for which he would forever be remembered as the father of microbiology. He called these tiny creatures “animalcules,” or “little animals.” He estimated that his tiny sample of lake water contained millions of them.

  Van Leeuwenhoek was at first reluctant to share the discovery. More than a year passed before he finally described the animalcules in a letter to Oldenburg. Van Leeuwenhoek had guessed, correctly as it turned out, that he would not be believed. To most people in the late seventeenth century, the existence of creatures so small was beyond imagining. Many thought he was literally insane. Their suspicions only grew when van Leeuwenhoek would not provide them with a microscope capable of verifying what he had seen. Not until his later years, when his notoriety began to attract famous visitors, even royalty, did he give away some as gifts. Even then, the recipients complained that those they were given didn’t work like the ones they had gazed through in van Leeuwenhoek’s home.

  If van Leeuwenhoek would not send his microscopes to them, then the Royal Society decided it would go
to his microscopes. A delegation of several prominent British and Dutch clergymen arranged to travel to Delft. They eventually confirmed van Leeuwenhoek’s claims. Within a few years, his reputation soared among the international scientific community. In 1680, the Dutch haberdasher became a full member in the Royal Society. He never attended a meeting, though, not even his own induction ceremony.

  Four years after his observations of Berkelse Mere, van Leeuwenhoek made another monumental discovery. While examining his own saliva, he decided to look at the plaque between his teeth, which he described as “a little white matter, which is as thick as if it ’twere batter.” There again, he discovered animalcules, little string-like creatures he described as looking like tiny eels. He judged he had seen a thousand in a bit of plaque “no bigger than a hundredth part of a sand-grain.”

  Soon, he was examining the dental plaque of almost everyone who would participate. In an old man who “never washed his mouth his entire life,” he found plaque swarming with animalcules. Yet in the plaque of another old man, “whose teeth were uncommon foul,” he found none. He guessed—probably correctly—that the absence of animalcules was because the man was so fond of wine and brandy. In a letter to the Royal Society that became one of his most famous, van Leeuwenhoek wrote “that all the people living in our United Netherlands are not as many as the living animals that I carry in my own mouth this very day.” He wondered if the knowledge of their existence would prove too much for people to bear.