Known as the father of the Microscope, Anton Van Leeuwenhoek of Holland (1632-1723), started working in a dry goods store where magnifying glasses were used to count the threads in cloth. He was fascinated by the glasses used by people who made window drapes to inspect the quality of cloth. He taught himself new methods for grinding and polishing tiny lenses of great curvature which gave magnifications up to 270 times, the finest known at that time.

These lenses led to the building of Anton Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes considered the first practical microscopes, and the biological discoveries for which he is famous. Anton Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see and describe bacteria (1674), yeast plants, the teeming life in a drop of water, and the circulation of blood corpuscles in capillaries. During a long life he used his lenses to do studies on an extraordinary variety of things, both living and non-living, and reported his findings in over a hundred letters to the Royal Society of England and the French Academy.

None of Anton Van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes exist today. His instruments were made of gold and silver and were sold by his family after he died, none have been recovered.