Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was born October 24, 1632 in Delft, Holland. His father was a basket-maker and his mother's family was brewers. Antoni, as a child, was educated in a school in the town of Warmond and then lived with his uncle in Benghvien. In 1648 he was an apprenticed in a linen-draper's shop. Around 1654 he returned to Delft, where he spent the rest of his life. He had little or no scientific education, yet sometime around 1668, Antoni learned to grind lenses, made simple microscopes, and began observing with them. It appears that he was inspired to take up microscopy by having seen a copy of Robert Hook's illustrated book Micrographia, which showed Hook's own observation with the microscope.
             Leeuwenhoek made over 500 "microscopes", of which today less than ten survived. All of Leeuwenhoek's instruments-most certainly the ones that are known- were simply powerful magnifying glasses, not compound of the type used today. Although Leeuwenhoek was often called "the inventor of the microscope", he was no such thing. Several of his predecessors had built compound microscopes and were making important discoveries with them. Because of the different technical difficulties in building compound microscopes, they couldn't magnify objects more than about twenty or thirty times natural size. Because of Leeuwenhoek's skill at grinding lenses, together with his natural acute eyesight and great care in adjusting the lighting where he worked, it enabled him to build microscopes that magnified 200 times, with clearer and brighter images than any of his colleagues. What also distinguished him was his curiosity to observe almost anything that could be placed under his lenses, and his care in describing what he saw. He hired an illustrator to prepare drawings of the things he saw, to accompany his written descriptions, because he himself could not draw well.
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