carrier of the plague bacteria, and innocently, Hooke might have been
playing with fire in his dissections and depictions.
Hooke spent considerable time investigating the structure of plants as
well. His microscope had just the right amount of magnification for him to
detect the minute building blocks that comprised the organization of the
plant—coining the term cell for the little “rooms” he saw in the
microstructure of cork—and the term would be adopted for all plant and
animal microscopy going forward. The cellular basis of life would not be
uncovered until the mid–19th century, and it would take modern chemistry
to make it real.
Most of us have an image that immediately pops into our mind at the
mention of the word “microscope.” It is a tilted black metal tube mounted
on a U-shaped stand, holding a glass slide on a platform. Today, of course,
there is an electrical cord that supplies the energy for the light bulb at the
bottom of the microscope, illuminating the slide from underneath. There
are also focus rings and adjustment knobs to move the platform and glass
slides. This has been the form of the microscope for centuries, but the
world’s first microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek had a “bead
microscope,” a seemingly bizarre and limited tool that actually allowed
him to see living cells in a way that no one ever had.
Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch surveyor and cloth merchant, and was used
to using a telescope to see distant landmarks and a magnifying lens to
count threads in material (this brings to mind the “thread-count” in
sheets). Utilizing a single, tiny glass bead with a highly convex edge and
placing it on a small metal paddle, Leeuwenhoek was able to view tiny
objects held in place with wax on a needlepoint very near the glass bead.
Small screws permitted movement of the object up and down, and forward
and backward. For decades, he corresponded with the Royal Society,
submitting drawings of the microscopic world, describing the unseen that
had been revealed to him with his primitive yet practical tool.
Leeuwenhoek initially published articles in the Royal Society’s
Proceedings about bee stingers, lice, and the hidden world in a drop of
pond water, but within a few years, published a work on the startling
appearance of sperm. In 1677, he wrote to the Royal Society, offering his
willingness to submit a paper, “If your Lordship should consider that these
observations may disgust or scandalise the learned, I earnestly beg your
Lordship to regard them as private and to publish or destroy them as your
marcin
(Marcin)
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