Rock Doc

Born in 1632 in the Netherlands, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a self-taught man who made microscopes – ultimately producing some 500 of them. Microscopes consist of lenses of carefully ground class. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify objects up to two hundred times. That opened up a range of investigations to him and he took advantage of the new devices he was creating to look at almost anything and everything, including bacteria he obtained from between his teeth.

Van Leeuwenhoek also took a deep interest in a common substance: sand. He collected it and studied it. That may have been b...