Eye to eye with a 350-year old cow: Leeuwenhoek’s specimens and original microscope reunited in historic photoshoot

What may be the earliest surviving objects seen by microscope – specimens prepared and viewed by the early Dutch naturalist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek – have been reunited with one of his original microscopes for a state of the art photoshoot. This event allowed science historians to recapture the ‘look’ of seventeenth century science, recording the moment in digital films and with stunning high-resolution colour photographs for the first time.

Delft-based naturalist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was one of the first generation of serious microscope users, famous for his high-powered single-lens instrument that enabled him to see the natural world down to the scale of some large bacteria. As evidence for his 1670s and 1680s observations, narrated in letters to the London’s Royal Society, he sent a variety of specimens: cows’ optic nerves, sections of cork and elder, and ‘dried phlegm from a barrel’.