Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist and tradesman (1632–1723), was inspired to make and use them by a best-selling book, Micrographia, produced in 1665 by English scientist Robert Hooke (1635–1703).

Hooke's method also produced ball-shaped lenses free of the contaminations that marred earlier glass-blowing methods van Leeuwenhoek said he had experimented with and found wanting.

In 1668, van Leeuwenhoek paid his first and only visit to London, where he probably saw a copy of Robert Hooke's 'Micrographia' (1665) which included pictures of textiles that would have been of ...

He says some of van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify things more than 200 times. And contemporaries, like Robert Hooke in England, who’d written a book full of microscopic observations ...

But Van Leeuwenhoek refused to talk, even when Hooke sent another Royal Society member, Thomas Molyneaux, to Van Leewenhoek’s home and laboratory in Delft, The Netherlands to pry the secret out ...

Henry Baker drew this illustration of van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes in 1756. 1683: Anton van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to Britain's Royal Society describing the "animalcules" he observed under ...

Hooke had previously described, in 1678, a simple technique to make such beads by melting the end of a glass needle — but it was Van Leeuwenhoek’s unrivalled craftsmanship that honed this ...