ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Seventeenth-Century Microscope and Observation Practices

• In Event: How to Visualize the Previously Unknown – A Multidisciplinary Approach

English Abstract

The history of the seventeenth-century microscope is traditionally written as that of an instrument that branched off from the telescope in the early seventeenth century, whose development was driven by increasing optical power. However, this narrative proves to be ill-founded for several reasons, such as the lack of preserved microscopes dating from before the 1660s making it difficult to assess the role of lens power and lens quality in early microscopy. If optical power of the instrument was not the sole driver of improvement in seventeenth-century microscopy, what other factors shaped the then upcoming field? In Visualizing the Unknown, we took a practical approach to answer this question. By means of re-enactment using historic microscopes, we probed to what extent specimen preparation, manipulation, and illumination impose the quality of microscopic observations, instead of the optical possibilities and magnification of the instrument. This paper shows our research in finding the intimate connections between microscopic observations and these boundary conditions. Zooming out, seventeenth-century microscopy emerges from our research as a field in continuous motion, in which observation strategies were aligned with these conditions. This conclusion allows us to re-interpret the rise of high-magnification microscopy in the 1670s – in particular the work of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek – as an approach that was not merely prompted by the availability of strong lenses alone but rather by a sharpening of an entire system of microscopic observation.

Author

• Tiemen Cocquyt, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave