New instrument analyzes by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, father of microbiology, solve a 350-year-old mystery surrounding his lenses.
Behind the success of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek , Dutch optician and naturalist who first observed bacteria under a microscope and described capillaries, muscle fibers and spermatozoa in detail, there were lenses worked with skill and the ability to feed a halo of mystery on his own image: this, and nothing more.
Three centuries after the death of the scientist (1632-1723), who lived and worked in Delft in the golden years of the development of the optical sciences, a study published in Science Advances tries to answer the question that tormented his rivals: what did they have? , your lenses, so special? How did Antoni van Leeuwenhoek make such precise and detailed observations at a time when microscopy was still in its infancy for everyone else?
TRADER AND INVENTOR. Scientists at the Technische Universiteit Delft (Holland) used neutron tomography, a CT-like scanning technique that uses neutron beams instead of X-rays, to analyze the microscopes created by their ancient fellow citizen, which he supported the activity of salesman of fabrics a keen interest in the manufacture of glass lenses.
By perfecting the lenses used to magnify the textures of the fabrics and mounting them on small brackets, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek created about 500 telescopes with much more advanced magnification capabilities than other instruments of the time. One of these allowed specimens to be magnified by 266 times and to observe details down to 1.35 micrometers (millionths of a meter): in the second half of the 1600s, most microscopes could magnify at most thirty times.
PLAQUE, BACTERIA, SPERMATOZOA. Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek described the wonderful worlds revealed by the microscope in 190 letters sent to the Royal Society of London, a prestigious national academy of scientists. In this correspondence he told of the first microscopic unicellular organisms, massed in a single drop of stagnant water, he told of spermatozoa , which he defined animalculi (animals with head and tail), he wrote of having observed blood cells, capillaries and muscle fibers. In 1683, he pointed a microscope at the plaque on his teeth and described the colonies of bacteria in the unwashed mouths of two elderly volunteers – the first microscopic observation of bacteria that no one else would have been able to replicate for more than a century.
