Whodunit Wednesday: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

I remember very well the first time that I was introduced to the world of smaller things all around us. I do not remember how young I was, but I was encouraged to get some pond water in a jar and observe it. I was used to observing and enjoyed it. We had an aquarium and I could easily sit for quite some time observing the fish and their habits and reactions to one another. So observing a glas jar of pond water was not a problem. 

After sitting and watching for a little bit, it was clear that there were things living in the water. They were swimming all around. If you took a magnifying glass, you could even see some of the swimming things up close - if they swam in front of your glass. When I was older I would be introduced to the microscope and the amazing world of even smaller things. 

Anyone who starts looking into microbiology will come across the name of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (even if they cannot pronounce it). Antonie (or Anthony, as we might call him in English) was born in Delft, the Netherlands in 1632. He grew up with a step-father (his father died when he was 5) and an uncle (after his step-father died when Antonie was 10). He was a businessman who worked with cloth. 

It was his desire to be able to see things better for his business that led him to create better magnifying glasses. His kept his method secret and discovered that he could use his lenses for seeing more than threads. He was the first to see single cell organisms and thereby change the thinking of the Royal Society at the time. And he did all of this considering himself simply a businessman and speaking no other language than his native Dutch. 

Van Leeuwenhoek’s strength lay in his microscopes. He made lenses that no one else knew how to make. It was not until 1957 that a similar type microscope lens was made and only in 2021 that a Dutch study of a Leeuwenhoek lens finally showed how it was made. These small lenses could magnify up to 500 times. Using these lenses van Leeuwenhoek discovered things like spermatozoa, muscular fibers, bacteria and the vacuole of the cell. 

As in the time of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, it is still the amazing complexity of the design in nature that continues to point us to the Creator who has made everything so well. The deeper we look, the more complexity we see and the more convinced we should become of the design of God in all that He has made.