blood cells flowing through capillaries, spermatozoa,
and insects including the parasites of the flea.
Leeuwenhock was the first to report
the existence of single-celled organisms.
This strained the credibility
of members of the Royal Society of London so
they sent a delegation to Delft
to see whether Leeuwenhock was a madman or a genius.
It turned out that on good testimony
Leeuwenhock was sane, and that Hooke was able
to verify Leeuwenhock’s observations.
Lenses
Leeuwenhock made his own tiny spherical lenses
capable of magnification between 275 to 500 times
by melting the tip of a thin thread of glass
so that it formed a sphere. He set this sphere
in a simple tool that held the sample to the light
and let him adjust its position in three
dimensions.
Robert Hooke’s first microscopes
descended from the compound lens telescope,
but eventually he learned how to make
tiny perfect lenses the way Leeuwenhock did.
Sense of scale
The bulk of living things on Earth
are smaller than our eyes, unaided, can see, and so
it takes naïvité or a form of intellect to
accept,
in the scale of things,
our true insignificance.
Hooke’s Micrographia described not only very small
things, but also the Pleiades and the craters of the moon. Without
instruments, the exceedingly small and the exceedingly distant are
impossible for us to see.
Hooke’s Micrographia described not only very small things, but also the Pleiades and the craters of the moon. Without instruments, the exceedingly small and the exceedingly distant are impossible for us to see.
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