Antoni van Leeuwenhoek 384th birthday: How the Dutch scientist showed us how disgusting and wondrous we are

The ‘Father of Microbiology’ showed us the tiniest details of our bodies – including the sperm cell and the diseases that can inhabit them – and gets a Google Doodle for his trouble

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is being celebrated for his work on microbiology with a Google Doodle. And it is well deserved – he is the scientist who perhaps did the most to help us understand what we are.

Van Leeuwenhoek helped pioneer microbiology, and has been known as “the father of microbiology”. That involves seeing ourselves and other organisms in their tiniest form – and he was the first to spot some of the very small parts of our body that makes it do very big things, like being alive in the first place.

He was the first person to see and document the sperm cell, for instance. And that was just one of then miniature parts of our body he saw: he also depicted the muscle fibres that help us move and the blood flow that keeps the oxygen in our body so it can work.

He did all of that through his pioneering work on microscopes, which helped people magnify their vision by 300 times and see far more of the tiny world that surrounds us. By improving that technology massively, he was able to spot the small cellular systems that would become his life’s work – it was through making lenses that he came to understand so much about the world.

Those lenses were made using silver or copper frames and lenses that were designed to zoom in by as much as 275 times. Some have suggested that he may have created lenses far more powerful than that, giving as much as 500 times more magnified vision than the human eye.

He didn’t tell anyone how he had created such revolutionary viewing techniques. It wasn’t until 1975 – hundreds of years after his death – that anyone was actually able to make a microscope in the same way that the Dutchman did.

That was in keeping with a life in which van Leeuwenhoek set little down about his work. He never published himself, and instead detailed his revolutionary work in writings to the Royal Society, which then published his findings.

But that work helped find out much of what we now know about the tiny and usually invisible life that so closely affects our own. He was able to spot, for instance, the tiny cells that can start life and can also bring it to an end.

But the disease that he would eventually give his name to was one that he found, but also one that he suffered with. Late in his life van Leeuwenhoek was struck by a disease that meant he experienced spasms in his body like hiccups – it is now known as van Leeuwenhoek's disease and to this day there is no cure for it. It killed the scientist at the age of 90, on 26 August 1723.

But the pioneering scientist has been remembered again in today’s Google Doodle. Gerben Steenks, who made the image, said that it shows the kind of power that microscopes can give – and the animation shows the surprising new world that was found with the technology, so important but so invisible in our daily lives.