Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was born in Delft, in the Dutch Republic, on 24 October 1632, the son of a basket-maker. He trained in a cloth merchant's shop in Amsterdam, where magnifying glasses were used to inspect fabric, and later ran his own drapery business in Delft and held minor civic offices. Without a university education or knowledge of Latin, he taught himself to grind and polish tiny lenses and built hundreds of simple, single-lens microscopes, some magnifying more than two hundred times. From 1673 until his death he sent about two hundred letters, written in Dutch, to the Royal Society in London describing what he saw. He described red blood cells, muscle fibres, the flow of blood through capillaries, and sperm cells. In a famous letter of 1676 he reported 'little animals' swimming in rainwater and in infusions of pepper, and he later found similar creatures in the plaque scraped from teeth: the first recorded observations of protists and bacteria. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1680. He died in Delft on 26 August 1723.

Faith: Member of the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Robert Koch · Louis Pasteur · Isaac Newton