Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
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Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch microbiologist and microscopist in the Golden Age of Dutch art, science and technology. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as "the F
Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680
Van Leeuwenhoek's birth house at Oosteinde, before it was demolished in 1926
The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer
A microscopic section of a one-year-old ash tree (Fraxinus) wood, drawing made by Van Leeuwenhoek
Microorganism
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A microorganism, or microbe, is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells. The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from a
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
…his own shop in 1654. He became well-recognized in municipal politics and developed an interest in lensmaking. In the 1670s, he started to explore microbial life with his microscope. Using single-lensed microscopes of his own design and make, Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe and to experiment with microbes…
A cluster of Escherichia coli bacteria magnified 10,000 times
Lazzaro Spallanzani showed that boiling a broth stopped it from decaying.
Louis Pasteur showed that Spallanzani's findings held even if air could enter through a filter that kept particles out.