In the fall of 1677, on a bright moonlit night, 45-year-old Leeuwenhoek and his wife were in ML. He "had an orgasm in less than a few seconds" and jumped up and went straight to his lab with a semen sample. In his own equipment, under a microscope, Wen Hook saw "tens of thousands of living miniature animals the size of grains of sand—swimming with thin tails five or six times longer than his own body, like tadpoles, and like snakes or eels swimming in the water, as if sprinting toward an important destination."
If you say that a person who did not even graduate from junior high school finally entered the National Academy of Sciences, what would you think?
In fact, there are such special cases in ancient and modern China and abroad. Today I will share with you the inventor of the microscope - "Leeuwenhoek".
Of course, since last year, "Leeuwenhoek" as an internet buzzword has suddenly become active on major social media platforms and bullet screens. "You are Leeuwenhoek", "Worthy of being Leeuwenhoek", "Leeuwenhoek Girl", "Leeuwenhoek-style drama"...
Leeuwenhoek with his microscope
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch microscopist and pioneer of microbiology, was born on 24 October 1632 in Delft, a small city between The Hague and Rotterdam. (There is a famous color in porcelain - Delft blue). He also included the most famous Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675).
First, choice is far more important than effort
Far from it, let's go back to his infancy. Hook did not attend school for a few days as a child, and until he was 16 years old, in order to make a living, in 1648 he chose to go to the big city (equivalent to what we now do north drifting) - their capital Amsterdam. When he came here, he was not in a hurry to find a job, and through careful observation, he found the place with the greatest traffic - the cloth shop.
Imagine, in that month of that year, what shops people couldn't do without? Thousands of miles to be an official in order to eat and wear! The big thing besides eating the rest is dressing! So he chose to work as an apprentice in a cloth shop. Because he chose the right industry, from apprentice to treasurer assistant, after 4 years of accumulation, his income gradually entered a better state, but after all, this was to make a wedding dress for others, so he resigned decisively and became his own boss.
At the age of 20, he returned to his hometown of Delft and relied on his contacts and knowledge accumulated over the years to run his own silk cloth shop. After that, the career was in the ascendant, with its first pot of gold, and realized the dream that many men had - financial freedom.
After middle age, Hooke gradually got to know the local high-ranking government officials because of his successful career. Subsequently, all the past is the prologue. Life was arranged very smoothly, and he was assigned by the mayor of Delft to do municipal affairs. This kind of work is very well paid and very easy, and you can order a day, and the monk can hit the clock on the same day. Give him more time.
Second, interest + persistence = success
However, Hooke, who has time, does not lie flat, but engages in the grinding lens work that he has loved since childhood, thinning the thickness of a lens, thickening it again, repeatedly changing its focal length for observing the texture of the body; the hairs on the insect arthropods; focusing on the sun... In his early work, he concentrated on polishing more and smoother lenses. He successively used glass, gemstones, and diamonds as materials to create lenses of different shapes and used them to observe the subtle objects in nature.
In the same period of history, there have been microscopes in other places, for example: in 1595, there was a young man named Jensen, who liked to invent, and by chance, Jensen overlapped two convex lenses of different shapes, and then observed by stretching the distance of the two lenses, and then accidentally found that the tiny matter in the mirror could be magnified many times. After that, he and his father began to work out the first compound microscope, although the magnification was only 9 times, but it was also equivalent to unveiling the first milestone of the human understanding microscope.
In 1648, the microscope was introduced to Italy, and there was a young man named Malbiqui in the local area, who played the application of the microscope to the extreme, studied various small animals, used the microscope to observe the lungs and kidneys of small frogs, used the microscope to study eggs, silkworm eggs, butterflies, bee nests, etc., and finally slowly developed embryology.
Let's come back to Hooke. In 1665, Hooke finally used his knowledge to create a duplex microscope formed from top to bottom using 2 convex lenses, and used it to study the thin layers in the bark of the tree, and wrote an academic report on plant cells. Although he was a halfway monk, Hooke was a generalist, and most importantly, he would improve the microscope and continue to enlarge the magnification of the microscope. The result was that microscopic sexual function at that time could be magnified to about 300 times. You know, this is a technological innovation! He can see things that others can't see — such as microbes and sperm.
In the autumn of 1677, on a bright moonlit night, 45-year-old Leeuwenhoek and his wife were in ML. He "had an orgasm in less than a few seconds" and jumped up and went straight to his lab with a semen sample. In his own equipment, under a microscope, Wen Hook saw "tens of thousands of living miniature animals the size of grains of sand—swimming with thin tails five or six times longer than his own body, like tadpoles, and like snakes or eels swimming in the water, as if sprinting toward an important destination."
Early microscopes
3. Write books and make statements
One day in 1673, after being introduced by a friend, Leeuwenhoek mailed to the Royal Society his years of research, "Several Records of Leeuwenhoek's Observation of Skin, Meat, and Bees and Other Insects with a Homemade Microscope." The contents of the content of the drawings were not seen by members of the Royal Society, and caused great controversy at the time.
Experiments are the supreme court of science. When Hooke brought the most elaborate microscope to the Royal Society, when he observed that "there are 1 million of these small things in a rough grain of sand; and a drop of water— in which Dilken is not only able to grow well, but also reproduce actively — can parasitize about 2.7 million Dilkens," all of them dropped their jaws!
Eventually, Leeuwenhoek's account was translated into English and published in the royal society journal. This research report by the countrymen really caused a sensation in british academia. Leeuwenhoek also quickly became a fellow of the Royal Society and spoke highly of his achievements.
Conclusion: Insist on doing one thing, do it repeatedly, do it to the extreme, and you will reap an unexpected result.