{"id":1239,"date":"2016-10-24T14:34:15","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T21:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scifundchallenge.org\/firesidescience\/?p=1239"},"modified":"2018-09-10T17:27:38","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T00:27:38","slug":"the-man-who-discovered-a-new-world-in-a-drop-of-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scifundchallenge.org\/firesidescience\/2016\/10\/24\/the-man-who-discovered-a-new-world-in-a-drop-of-water\/","title":{"rendered":"The man who discovered a new world in a drop of water"},"content":{"rendered":"

Science for Kids<\/h4>\n

This is a true story about a man who lived in the Netherlands more than\u00a0300 years ago.<\/p>\n

Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632, and lived in a city\u00a0called Delft. He was married and had one child, a girl called Maria. He was quite a well-known person around town and he made a living selling woollen cloth and other fabric.<\/p>\n

\"Antonius
Antonius van Leeuwenhoek. Coloured stipple engraving by J. Chapman, 1813, after J. Verkolje. [CC BY 4.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cloth sellers liked to look at their\u00a0cloth\u00a0up close with\u00a0a magnifying glass. A magnifying glass is a lens, which is piece of glass in a special shape that can make things look bigger than they are.<\/p>\n

Antoni taught himself\u00a0how to make much better lenses. He made these into microscopes. These could make things look at least\u00a0200 times bigger than they really are! These microscopes<\/a>\u00a0don’t look anything like the big microscopes we have today. They were quite small and you\u00a0had to hold them up very close to the eye.<\/p>\n

Using these home-made microscopes Antoni could see things that were smaller than anyone had ever seen before.<\/p>\n

Antoni was curious, and he loved to explore\u00a0things with his microscopes. So he explored a lot of the things that he found around him.\u00a0When he looked in a drop of water he saw tiny living things that people had never imagined before. He called them “animalcules”.<\/p>\n

Antoni wrote about these tiny creatures\u00a0to a club for important scientists called the Royal Society. These scientists thought well of\u00a0him as a scientist until they read his\u00a0letter about a\u00a0tiny world inside a drop of water. They laughed<\/a> and thought he was being silly. But when\u00a0they saw these creatures\u00a0for themselves they were convinced\u00a0and soon made him a member of their club.<\/p>\n

Many people were amazed, and kings and queens wanted him to show them these little creatures. Today we call these tiny creatures Protists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Antoni didn’t work as a scientist, but in fact he was doing real\u00a0science with his home-made microscopes. He made a lot of very important discoveries.<\/p>\n