When Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the late 17th-century drape maker turned amateur scientist, first described microbes, people thought he was crazy.
He focused his homemade microscopes on water from a pond outside his house, and on the dental plaque from his neighbors in Delft, the Netherlands. And he became the very first person to see a teeming world of life previously inaccessible to the human eye.
We'd later learn that this vast system of bacteria, fungi, archaea, and other microbes is vital to life on Earth, and that we've actually evolved from and with these organisms. But people at the time didn't know what to make of Leeuwenhoek's wild descriptions — the "little animals" that were "a-swimming more nimbly than any I had ever seen" — which would ultimately lay the groundwork for microbiology.
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