A Brief History of Microbiology

The First Observations

In the first century AD glass had been invented and the Romans (naturally) experimented with lenses. They found that making lenses that were thick in the middle and thin at the edges produced a magnifying effect.

By the end of the 13th century spectacle makers were using lenses to make glasses. Somewhere around 1590 two Dutch spectacle makers, Zaccharias Janssen and his father Hans, discovered that if they put several lenses in a tube they could get a pretty decent magnifying effect, much better than the 6X-10X magnification achieved with simple lenses. This was the advent of the compound microscope.

Of course Galileo got involved and did a few experiments of his own. He described the properties of lenses and light, added a focusing device to his microscope, and invented the telescope and modern astronomy.

Robert Hooke, using a microscope with a magnification of about 30X, observed that plant material was composed of “little boxes”; he introduced the term cell (1665).

Hooke’s observations laid the groundwork for development of the cell theory, the concept that all living things are composed of cells   (in 1838 Matthias Schleiden made the bold statement that plants are multicellular organisms, and in 1839 Theodor Schwann said the same thing about animals, thus gaining credit for cell theory).

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek started messing around with magnifying glasses when he worked in a dry goods store (he used them to count threads in bolts of cloth).

Being a do-it-himself kind of guy he insisted on learning to grind his own lenses.  It wasn't long before he developed a microscope with a magnification of about 270X, and using this instrument, looked at just about everything he could think of. 

Imagine his surprise when he observed a drop of water - and saw tiny little "animalcules".  van Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe microorganisms (first protozoa and then bacteria). He became more and more interested in science, and between 1673 and 1723 and published numerous papers on his observations.