40 Fun Facts About Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek

In a famous 1683 report, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek described bacteria darting about in a sample of what?

Dental plaque scraped from his own mouth teemed with life, he told the Royal Society. Two old men who had never cleaned their teeth gave him even livelier samples.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek opened his own shop in 1654 in which trade, far from any university?

Cloth merchant, or draper, was his trade. He had no degree, no scientific training and knew no language but Dutch, yet became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Which visiting ruler received Antonie van Leeuwenhoek on his boat and was given an eel-viewing microscope?

Peter the Great could use his new 'eel-viewer' to watch blood circulate whenever he wanted. Other callers over the years ranged from philosophers to English royalty.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was made trustee of the bankrupt estate of which painter, born in his city the same year?

Johannes Vermeer was baptised in the same town within days of him, and the two lived close to the main market. Whether they were friends is still a matter of guesswork.

What did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek say he rubbed on his teeth every morning to keep them sound?

Salt every morning was his habit, he wrote at fifty, and he credited it for his well-preserved teeth. After meals he also used a toothpick and rubbed them hard with a cloth.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek found a million tiny creatures in one drop of water in which he had soaked which spice?

Pepper water gave him creatures far smaller than any he had met before, now thought to be bacteria. He later admitted the true count per drop was nearer eight million.

The Dutch hospital named after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, part of a national research institute, treats which disease?

Cancer, not infection, is its speciality: the hospital is the clinical arm of a national institute founded in 1913. Its researchers reported a possible new human organ in 2020.

The Dutch surname Leeuwenhoek, borne by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, means the 'corner' of which animal?

Lion is 'leeuw' in Dutch and 'hoek' is corner: his family lived on the corner of an alley known as the Little Lion's Gate.

What did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first describe in 1677 and credit, wrongly, as the sole origin of a child?

Sperm cells, he argued, were where a child truly begins: man, he wrote, comes not from an egg. They were first seen through one of his microscopes that year.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek never wrote a book; in what form did he send his discoveries to the Royal Society?

Letters, hundreds of them in chatty everyday Dutch, were how he published. He kept sending them for fifty years, right up to the last weeks of his life.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek spent nearly all his life in which Dutch city, famous for its blue-and-white pottery?

Delft was his birthplace, his workplace and his grave: after an apprenticeship elsewhere he rarely left. The curious, kings included, had to come to him.

Unlike the compound instruments of rivals, each microscope made by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek magnified with what?

A single lens sat in a small metal plate held right up to the eye. Compound microscopes of the day managed about 30 times magnification; his went past 200.

A crater named after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek lies in the southern hemisphere of which Solar System body?

The Moon carries his name on its far side, permanently out of view from Earth. No telescope on the ground can show it; only spacecraft have seen it.

In 1687, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek roasted, sliced and pressed which bean to study it under his microscope?

Coffee beans, he found, were spongy inside and gave up an oil when pressed. He then boiled the grounds twice in rainwater and set the brew aside to study.

After pricking his own finger, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek became the first to correctly identify what?

Red blood cells had been glimpsed by two earlier microscopists who did not know what they were looking at. He judged each one 25,000 times smaller than a fine grain of sand.

By showing that grain weevils breed like other insects, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek opposed which old theory of life?

Spontaneous generation held that weevils arose from wheat and fleas from sand. He raised both and showed they were bred by parents of their own kind.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek watched blood squeeze through which vessels, one globule at a time, in a tadpole's tail?

Capillaries carry blood from the arteries across to the veins, and he reasoned that the human body must work in the same way as the tadpole's.

Which pioneer of germ theory and vaccines received the Leeuwenhoek Medal, named for Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in 1895?

Louis Pasteur took the medal in the final year of his life. It is awarded only about once a decade, to the scientist judged to have done most for the field.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek belongs to which celebrated era of Dutch art, science and technology in the 1600s?

The Golden Age turned the young Dutch Republic into a leader in painting, optics and science. The same era produced the pendulum clock.

By what name did the Royal Society's English translations call the tiny organisms Antonie van Leeuwenhoek found?

Animalcules, from the Latin for 'little animals', was the translator's choice for his plain Dutch word 'diertjes'. The term was still in use two centuries later.

Which author of Micrographia confirmed Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's findings for a doubting Royal Society?

Robert Hooke needed three attempts before he too saw the creatures, then showed them to the assembled fellows. His own 1665 book had probably inspired the Dutchman to start.

Which co-inventor of calculus broke a journey through Holland in 1676 to meet Antonie van Leeuwenhoek?

Gottfried Leibniz stopped off on his way from London to Hanover. He was one of a long line of famous callers who came to peer through the tiny microscopes.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first described the crystals behind which ailment, once nicknamed the disease of kings?

Gout strikes when urate crystals collect in a joint, and he described how they look under the microscope in 1679. The nickname came from its link with a rich diet.

Which spice did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek use to dye a specimen, an early case of microscope staining?

Saffron gave him what is often counted as the first histological stain in the history of the microscope. He is only known to have tried the trick once.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's first published report, in 1673, described mould, lice and the sting of which insect?

Bees gave him the stings he described in that debut, sent to London on a friend's recommendation. He could not draw well, so he hired an illustrator.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's father, who died when the boy was five, earned his living in which trade?

Basket maker was the family trade, followed by his father and his grandfather before him. His mother's relatives were well-off brewers.

At sixteen, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek left home for six years as an apprentice bookkeeper in which city?

Amsterdam gave him his only training: keeping the cash and the books at a shop on the Warmoesstraat. He went home in 1654, married and opened a business of his own.

Besides keeping shop and serving at the town hall, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek qualified in 1669 as what?

A surveyor's appointment came from the court of Holland, on top of his post as chamberlain to the sheriffs. He held the town hall job for almost 40 years.

Van Leeuwenhoek's disease, a rare flutter that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek described in himself, affects which body part?

The diaphragm twitched uncontrollably in his final illness, and he reported the symptoms with his usual precision. He was 90 and still observing.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek cut open which garden pests and found tiny live young inside instead of eggs?

Aphids, he found on dissecting them, held no eggs at all but tiny copies of the parent, and he never found a male. Charles Bonnet later proved by experiment that they can breed without mating.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was first to describe the banded stripes in the fibres of which body tissue?

Muscle fibres showed him their banded pattern in 1682, a first for microscopy. He put pieces of his own skin under the microscope too, counting the vessels running through it.

Which gut parasite did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek probably become first to see, in a sample of his own stool?

Giardia, a single-celled cause of stomach upsets, fits the creatures he described in 1681. Historians count it as the first likely sighting of the parasite.

Which journal, the longest-running in science, printed Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's reports to the Royal Society?

Philosophical Transactions began in 1665, eight years before his first report appeared in it. Its editors turned his everyday Dutch into English or Latin.

Which 1926 bestseller by Paul de Kruif opens with a chapter casting Antonie van Leeuwenhoek as the first of its heroes?

Microbe Hunters is credited with drawing countless young readers into science. Its opening chapter retells the story of the shopkeeper and his lenses.

Which inventor of the pendulum clock was among the famous visitors to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's home?

Christiaan Huygens, a skilled lens grinder himself, came from a family that backed the newcomer early. His father had written to London to vouch for him.

Which Dutch anatomist, namesake of the ovarian follicle, first recommended Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society?

Reinier de Graaf wrote that his townsman's microscopes far surpassed any seen before. He died within months, aged 32, never knowing what his friend would find.

Which German Romantic author cast Antonie van Leeuwenhoek as a flea circus owner in the 1822 novel Master Flea?

E.T.A. Hoffmann turned the scientist into a microscopist-magician with a troupe of fleas, a century after his death. Censors cut parts of the book before it could appear.

Which rolling green pond alga, a hollow ball of cells, did Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first report in 1700?

Volvox colonies can hold thousands of cells in one hollow sphere, easy to pick out under a microscope. Linnaeus gave the genus its name in 1758.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was buried in which church of his home city, known for its leaning brick tower?

The Oude Kerk, or Old Church, has a tower that leans about two metres out of true. He was laid to rest there four days after he died, aged 90.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek once examined the eye of which sea creature, alongside elephant skin and orange seeds?

A whale's eye was just one of his odder specimens. He also examined ladybirds, worms from a sheep's liver and the blood of fishes.