

A Visit to Amsterdam’s Microbe Museum - XYEaQMZJvS
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-visit-to-micropia-amsterdams-microbe-museum

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lovemenot
>> As Nick Lane, a biochemist from University College London, once wrote,
“More than being the first to see this unimagined world of animalcules, he was
the first even to think of looking.”

I very much doubt that. To achieve what he did, Van Leeuwenhoek would have
needed to: have technical skill; be literate and sufficiently educated; have
connections to get published; have access to material resources; have lived in
a time of exploration; have lived in a place of freedom of expression; be of
the required gender and race; have sufficient free time; and surely a certain
amount of luck.

How many others would likely have already considered - perhaps even tried - to
look for tiny living things, yet lacked one or more prerequisites from the
(incomplete) list above? Nick Lane cannot be refuted, yet this quotation
almost certainly does a disservice to the truth. Good and bad ideas are
everywhere all the time; Van Leeuwenhoek deserves credit, but only for his
execution.

~~~
chestnut-tree
Although Van Leeuwenhoek wasn't a scientist, the skill he deployed in
developing his microscope was a considerable achievement at the time. As in so
many scientific stories, his work spurned others into further discoveries.

Here's a BBC science documentary from 2009 called _The Cell_ that begins with
the story of Van Leeuwenhoek. Unfortunately, this YouTube copy has been dimmed
presumably to avoid a copyright takedown. It's a shame these documentaries
languish in the BBC archives.

Narrator: _" My starting point is September 1674 and the Royal Society of
London. A mysterious satchel arrived in this club for gentleman scientists. It
had taken five days to get here from Holland, across the North Sea by ship and
then by horseback rider. The package came from a man who built the world's
most powerful microscope, a microscope that revealed a hidden kingdom no-one
had seen before..."_

[https://youtu.be/nc9aSq22nmo?t=2m16s](https://youtu.be/nc9aSq22nmo?t=2m16s)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nit: "spurred"

