Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek

(1632 - 1723)

Born in 1632 during the Dutch Golden Age, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek was sixteen when he encountered a simple microscope—a mounted glass lens—while working as a cloth merchant’s bookkeeper in his hometown of Delft. He soon started to build his own microscopes and in 1674 began recording his observations of “animalcules” in letters to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society. In 1676 he wrote what is now known as Letter 18, considered to be the document that birthed protozoology and bacteriology.