Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek (1632 to 1723) was a Dutch microscopist from Delft, commonly called the Father of Microbiology. Largely self-taught, he worked as a draper and municipal official while teaching himself to make small single-lens microscopes of his own design. With them he was the first to observe and experiment with microbes, which he called dierkens or diertjes, and the first to document microscopic observations of muscle fibers, bacteria, spermatozoa and red blood cells; he was also among the first to see blood flow in capillaries. He wrote no books and instead described his discoveries in some 190 letters to the Royal Society in London, which translated and published many of them in its Philosophical Transactions. His friend, the physician Reinier de Graaf, introduced him to the Society, early skepticism about his single-celled organisms gave way to acceptance in 1677, and he was elected to the Society in 1680.