Did you know?
A sweeper invented the microscope!
In the 1740s. A teenager worked in a spectacle shop in Delft, Netherlands. The shop workers made glasses by rubbing glass. The boy watched them intently. Who knows what fun he had?
The boy's father had died a few years ago. His financial situation was very bad. So, without finishing school, he took a job at a grocery store with a meager salary. In the meantime, he got a job in the municipality. It was not a big job, but a sweeper's job. What other way was there to make ends meet?
The boy understood something when he saw the glass being cut in the spectacle shop. If you can rub a piece of glass and raise its middle, it becomes a lens. When you look through it, small objects look bigger. The boy once thought of making this thing himself. He understood that if you rub the glass more beautifully, and if you can make it perfect, it will become an even better lens.
After returning home, the boy really made a lens by rubbing glass. A better lens than the one in the eyeglass shop. When he looked through that lens, the object looked two or three hundred times bigger. The boy's enthusiasm increased. He made an even better lens. He put the lens on the end of a hollow tube made of copper sheet. A microscope was made. And an incredible world of small animals opened up before the boy.
At first, he would put whatever he found in front of him under the microscope and observe it.
The boy grew older. But his addiction to microscopes did not leave him. He made lenses by rubbing glass. And one by one, he made about four hundred microscopes. One day, he thought of something and put a drop of water under the microscope, and started the experiment. And then the door to another amazing animal world opened. All the creatures with terrible, terrifying visions were roaming around in that one drop of water. Unbeknownst to him, a great revolution in medical science took place. Later, in the hands of Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur, that world grew even bigger.
The man observed small things and kept a record of them. He did not do this, thinking that it would be useful in the future. Maybe it would be beneficial for his own observations. He was still a sweeper. So he might not have understood that it was a scientific discovery.
One of them said that if he told the people of the Royal Society in London about this, they might understand its meaning. But he was a sweeper. He did not have the money to travel from one country to another. So he got the address of the Royal Society and wrote a letter to the scientists there. The scientists of the Royal Society did not want to take it into account. But not everyone is the same. Some gave importance to it. In the meantime, Leeuwenhoek sent twenty-six microscopes to the addresses of the scientists of the Royal Society.
The Royal Society was the king of the scientific world at that time. It is difficult for a discovery to survive in the scientific world if it does not receive recognition from them. Now the scientists of the Royal Society have got their hands on a microscope. There is no harm in testing it! Some scientists looked into the tube of that instrument and saw that everything that the sweeper had said so far was true.
So he was made a member of the Royal Society. Only the most eminent scientists in the world can be members of this society. So the sweeper's honor increased a lot. Even the king of Russia and the queen of England went to that small town called Delft to meet him. They set foot in his dilapidated cottage.
The name of that sweeper was Leeuwen Hooke. He has made his place in history as the inventor of the microscope.
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