Tony the microbiologist

Tony grew up a poor Dutch boy from Delft.  His dad was a basket weaver and died when Tony was 5.  His mom remarried a painter but he died when Tony was 10.  Tony barely got time for school, but became a bookkeeper’s apprentice in a drapery shop. Still, he learned English and math and was clever. He taught himself to read English.  Drapers in 1650 did menial hand work and like taylors and sail makers were poorly paid.  In 1654, the resourceful Tony opened his own shop.  The people who put drapes in their homes were big shots—barons and wealthy merchants—and their wives were very finicky about the draperies.  The best fabrics were needed and for this, drapers carried magnifying glasses to examine the threads of the cloths at 2 or 3X magnification.  That’s what Tony wanted badly.  While doing a job in London in 1668, he came across a book Micrographica by Robert Hooke.  Hooke used a compound microscope of two lenses that was terrifically expensive, to enlarge 20X.  Tony was fascinated.  Here were pictures of legs of fleas covered with hair, the chambers of cork, and wool fibers.  The book also included a diagram and plans for the compound microscope.  But the price was way out of Tony’s league.  Glass was a precious commodity.  Lenses were taxed heavily and produced by the guild, an early form of labor union which closely guarded its secrets.

Still, the persistent Tony found a way to experiment with glass.  He found that a glass rod that is heated could be drawn out into a thin whisker, broken in two and then the end of the whisker, reheated until it forms a glass bead droplet on the end.  Tony noted that these almost perfect glass spheres could magnify greatly and so he devised a holder for the sphere that had pinholes for observation and a screw-and-pin that held a sample of something near it.  It was crude but workable. To test the result, he looked at the same things that Hooke had.  Results confirmed.  Tony showed his cheapy magnifier to his friend, Dr. Reinier de Graaf. Amazingly he had achieved 200X magnification. The tiny glass spheres were far more uniform in curvature than ground lenses.  By pinholing them, he reduced aberration from the sides.   When a 1673 paper from the Royal Society of London bragged about microscopic work by another author, de Graaf wrote the Society a letter, “a most ingenious person here named Antonie Leeuwenhoek has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen.” Another Dutch scientist confirmed the draper’s work.  In 1674, Tony was crossing a lake in a boat and asked the locals why the water was green in some places and almost milky in others.  They claimed it was the dew.  That made the BS buzzer in Tony’s head go off, and he took a sample of the water home and put it under his best microscope of perhaps 500X.  To his amazement he saw “little creatures” darting about with flagellated tails and cilia waves on their bodies. This was the first observation of bacteria in the world. The microbes he was seeing, he described to his friend, an artist who dutifully drew pictures. Leeuwenhoek wrote the first of 275 letters to the Royal Society.  In the next 50 years he never published a proper scientific paper. 

Better times came to Tony.  He was appointed to an accountant position in city government, then to a lucrative post as surveyer. He lived until 90, having become the Father of Microbiology.  He was visited by royalty and kings—and not for drapes. In 1686 he was knighted for his microscopic work.  But I wonder what would have happened if he’d not found a way around the regulation, guilds and taxation of glass lenses with his own glass sphere making?  What if he’d not made the most of his education to take that job in London? He was 40 years old when he made his first microscope—a typical lifespan for the era. What if government officials had put his work to a halt by noting that he competed without degree or license. 

 The Economist notes that America’s economy needs lower taxes, less regulations, and better education these days.  If even the Europeans can see this problem amid 1.4% growth and an education system that ranks 30^th out of 40 OECD countries, why don’t we?