Small is Beautiful

How a Dutch merchant discovered an invisible world

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, at first glance, doesn’t much look like a revolutionary. When he made his great discovery, he was better known as a stout, peruked businessman; the founder of a successful drapery business, selling linen and yarn to the tailors and seamstresses that thronged the streets of mid-17th Century Delft, a city at the heart of the Dutch economic miracle.

But he was also the first person to see and describe bacteria – one of the key moments in the history of science, with implications that are still being unravelled.

The key to his breakthrough was the manufacture of a powerful lens.

The grinding of lenses had become a Dutch speciality and, in 1608, Hans Lippershey, a spectacle-maker from Zeeland, became the first person to apply for a patent for an instrument using a pair of lenses “for seeing things far away as if they were nearby”.