Who is the Father of Bacteriology?

The title 'Father of Bacteriology' belongs to a brilliant Dutch scientist and businessman named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (born in 1632 in the Netherlands).

• Surprisingly, he was not a trained doctor or university professor. He started his career as a simple cloth merchant.

To check the quality of the threads in the cloth he was buying, Leeuwenhoek taught himself how to grind and polish incredibly tiny glass lenses.

• He became a master lens maker. While other scientists had weak magnifying glasses, Leeuwenhoek secretly built tiny, single-lens microscopes that were capable of magnifying objects up to 300 times their original size.
• His microscope design was so advanced that no one could match its quality for another 150 years.

Because he was extremely curious, he put everything under his microscope: rainwater, human blood, and even plaque scraped from his own teeth.

• In 1676, while looking at a drop of pond water, he saw millions of tiny, living creatures swimming around.
• He called these tiny creatures 'Animalcules' (little animals).
• Without realizing it, he had just become the very first human being in history to physically see living Bacteria and protozoa.