Who needs fancy electron microscopes when you’ve got the simple but ingenious hand-held microscope through which microbes were seen for the first time almost 340 years ago. These pictures – of the ...

On a quiet street in Delft in the 17th century, a draper bent over a piece of fabric with a magnifying glass. He was not a scholar in a grand university or a man with a patron's purse. He was a ...

1683: Anton van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to Britain's Royal Society describing the "animalcules" he observed under the microscope. It's the first known description of bacteria. Van Leeuwenhoek had ...

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