Anton van Leeuwenhoek: Unveiling the Microscopic World

A lust was clinging Anton van Leeuwenhoek was born on October 14, 1632, in the city of Delft, Holland. By making baskets and selling country liquor, the family members had maintained their personal prestige. When his father died, the boy Anton left his small town with blue windmills and canals and settled in Amsterdam. After reaching here, he started working at a grocer’s place. At the age of 21, he returned home from Amsterdam and opened a grocery shop in Delft itself. Also, he got a job as a janitor at the city hall.o Anton very badly – ​​to keep rubbing the lens day and night. Lens after lens, second better than the first. That work which continuously becomes more and more complete. In total he made about 400 magnifying glasses. Tiny lenses, less than an eighth of an inch in diameter—no larger than a letter printed on a page. But those same lenses could not be beaten till date. With these lenses of his own, he prepared ‘minor microscopic’ instruments, but how strange their utility was! What a strange craftsman was Antana who had also made delicate and strong stands with his own hands to hold these tiny lenses.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek
Anton van Leeuwenhoek

Galileo constantly turned his telescope to the sky, Leeuwenhoek fixed private lenses on the continuum of the generally invisible world. Whatever microscopic things he could get his hands on – cracks in the skin, animal hair, the legs and head of a fly – all had to be examined under a microscope.

All these were signs of a lunatic in the eyes of the neighbors – hours pass and he does not budge from his microscope! He was not at all disturbed by the criticisms of the innocent people of Delft. He kept looking at the world through his microscope and he always got strange and strange, and new to new, views. One day, when the rain stopped, he collected some water from a ditch and found swimming in it very small aquatic animals, so small that the human eye could not even see them without such an aid. “Poor helpless animal!” from his mouth in websi turned out, because he was able to see them clearly only after thousand-multiplied by the microscope.

He had some feeling that these bacteria did not descend from the sky to the earth. To prove this, he collected rain water in a very clean cup this time. The microscope was fitted, but this time there were no insects etc. in the same water. But when the water was allowed to remain in the same cup for a few days, small insects started re-generating on their own. Leeuwenhoek came to the conclusion that along with the dust that the wind carries with it, it also comes from somewhere.

He cut his finger a little and put it under the microscope and he tested the blood. Red-red little germs! In 1674 AD, he sent an accurate description of his achievements to the Royal Society. After three years, he also wrote to the Society the details of the spores of dogs and other animals.

The Royal Society was stunned. Is this resident of Holland a scientist or a fan of science fiction? The Society wrote: Send the private microscope to the Society on loan for a few days. In response came another long letter – a very small world was opened and shown in it. But Leeuwenhoek was skeptical, he did not send the microscope. Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Gue were commissioned to design a very fine microscope, as Leeuwenhoek’s research would eventually have to be put to the test. Microscope prepared. He looked at blood under a microscope, grew bacteria in spice water, looked at plaque from private teeth, killed germs with hot water, and found that this world of tiny creatures is something different – the same As he had imagined after reading Leeuwenhoek’s letters. Now come the Royal Society respected this uneducated Dutch. In 1680, Anton von Leeuwenhoek was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1683, Von Leeuwenhoek made sketches of these chords. In an age of superstition, when the general public held the belief that certain types of creatures, such as flies, were self-generated and arose of their own accord from rotting soil, from dung, Leeuwenhoek proved directly that their origin The rules are also the same simple reproduction principle. He studied the wheat-destroying tunes and reported that these tunes are also blood and eggs. By placing the tail of the fish under the microscope, he saw that it too had tiny blood vessels and cells.

In 1673, a very long and strange letter reached the name of the Royal Society of London. After reading which the learned members of the society could not stop laughing. The writer of the letter was a Dutch shopkeeper, who, at the same time, was making ends meet by working as watchman for part of the day. Was. The laughter stopped suddenly and now a mixture of surprise and respect settled on the faces; For in the letter where this simple and unassuming man described his health, his neighbors and their superstitions, he himself gave the title of the letter, “By a Microscope Invented by Mr. Leeuwenhoek”. Eyewitnesses – Some examples of mildew on the skin and flesh etc., and stings etc. from another world.

In those days, while now, the magnifying glass was a simple lens made to magnify small things, which had to be held in the hand and whose power was not much, in those days an illiterate- The penitent storekeeper had realized his desire to make a lens by grinding glass into a microscope through which objects could now be magnified hundreds of times. The Royal Society • respectfully invited Leeuwenhoek to continue his experiments, resulting in a further 375 letters to the Society over the next fifty years!

The letters written in the name of the Royal Society and the Academy of Sciences of Paris were discussed everywhere and as a result, Leeuwenhoek’s fame now spread throughout the world. Even the Czar of Russia and the Queen of England could not control their distraught mind after reading these descriptions. He was also curious to see some of Anton’s microscope himself. He himself came to his place. There was no change in his daily activities till the end. He had found extraordinary health. Till the age of 91, he was engaged in his work in the same way. He died on 26 August 1728 AD. But before dying, he had given two last letters to a friend to put them in the name of the Royal Society.

Von Leeuwenhoek’s microscope was a very simple instrument: only a single lens, and that too very small. combining two types of lenses into one This type of compound microscope had already been invented in 1590 AD, but some technical problems were encountered in making it so much that von Leeuwenhoek’s simple instrument always gave better results. Since then, the art of making lenses has progressed a lot. Modern microscopes can show objects up to 2,500 times the diameter. And the need of the scientists is to see things even bigger than this. The ‘viruses’ of modern medicine are much smaller than the bacteria or bacteria that Leeuwenhoek saw. Today, instead of a ray of light, in science, when the use of electron microscope is becoming common, work is done with the streams of electrons, through which the scientist can easily see small objects by spreading them up to 100,000 diameters.

Anton von Leeuwenhoek didn’t have the efficient or modern tools of present-day science, but he had something that science hasn’t been able to better today: unflinching devotion to an idea, unrelenting patience, and an extraordinary instinct to perceive the object. Shakti, the inner eye.

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