Question

Why was Anton van Leeuwenhoek able to see single-celled organisms that no one else had ever seen?

Answer 1

Anton van Leeuwenhoek was not a scientist: but a businessman who sold drapery. During those days, traders used to examine quality of textile fibres by using magnifying glass. I would mention the facts which I think made him famous as Father of Microbiology .

• Leeuwenhoek became an assistant at a draper's shop at very young age and he must have seen glass processing in Amsterdam before coming back to his ancestral town of Delft. This place was famous for production of glazed pottery. It is here he picked up the hobby of making lenses.
• It would be important to note that when contemporary scientists were making and using compound microscopes with at least two lenses, Leeuwenhoek used a simple microscope with a single lens, smaller the lens better was the magnification.
• Using Leeuwenhoek's microscope was not easy: but he succeeded in making tiny glass spheres which could magnify better than the compound microscopes of those days.
• Leeuwenhoek was the first person who pursued to observe anything and everything using the lenses he painstakingly polished and made. Later in his life, when his work attracted enough attention, he even appointed illustrators.
• He had no formal university training but documented what he saw in detail. He had immense curiosity, an open mind and diligence. In comparison, Robert Hooke who first saw and described biological 'cells' , was a mathematician, an architect, a physicist, a biologist, a philosopher, an astronomer, a geologist all rolled into one!!
• Leeuwenhoek became more interested in observing specimens under the lenses after seeing an illustrated copy of Hooke's micrographia published in 1665. While Hooke became embroiled in enmity with influential personalities (notably Sir Newton) of his time, Leeuwenhoek continued his work of developing new lenses and discovering a new world of animalcules.
• When Leeuwenhoek started writing to Royal society of London describing what he saw with his lenses, support came from none other than Robert Hooke.