Scientists did not take him seriously. Antonie van Leeuwenhock had no Latin and no degree, and his discoveries were the fruit of happenstance.
To get a better look at the weaves of the fabric he sold, Antonie began experimenting with combinations of magnifying glasses, and by putting glass to glass he invented a five-hundred-lens microscope that in a drop of water revealed a multitude of microbes swimming as fast as they could.
Among other triflings, this cloth merchant discovered red blood cells, bacteria, spermatozoids, yeast, the life cycle of ants, the sexual life of fleas and the anatomy of bee stingers.
In the same city, Delft, in the same month of 1632, both Antonie and the painter Vermeer were born. And in that city each of them dedicated their lives to seeing the invisible. Vermeer sought the light hiding in the shadows, while Antonie spied on the secrets of our most diminutive relatives in the kingdom of this world.
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