On September 7, 1674, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, a fabric seller living just south of The Hague, Netherlands, burst forth from scientific obscurity with a letter to London's Royal Society detailing an astonishing discovery. While he was examining algae from a nearby lake through his homemade microscope, a creature "with green and very glittering little scales," which he estimated to be a thousand times smaller than a mite, had darted across his vision. Two years later, he followed up with another report so extraordinary that biologists today refer to it simply as "Letter 18": Van Leeuwenhoek had looked everywhere and found what he called animalcules in everything. With these observations, he became the first person to ever see a microorganism—a discovery of almost incalculable significance to human health and our understanding of life on this planet. As WIRED contributor Cody Cassidy writes, what's so surprising is that this monumental discovery was not made by Galileo or Isaac Newton or some other great scientific mind of the 17th century. Instead, a self-taught Dutchman did it by handcrafting a magnifying lens 10 times more powerful than anything before it. Van Leeuwenhoek's design wouldn't be bested for another 150 years. Yet even as scientists steadily unlocked the secrets of his microworld over the past 350 years, one great mystery eluded them: How did a shopkeeper working during his off hours make such a powerful lens? Van Leeuwenhoek took that information to the grave. In 2018, museum curator Tiemen Cocuyt made it his mission to solve this centuries-old mystery. The challenge: How do you closely examine a tiny glass bead that's sandwiched between the brass plates of a priceless microscope that you're forbidden to disassemble? As Cassidy writes, that's where the nuclear reactor comes in. — Jon J. Eilenberg | Articles Editor |
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