Micrographia

And I'm Martha Barnette.

In 1665, the English scientist Robert Hooke published a book called Micrographia, and it quickly became a bestseller because it was the first book that shows what a microscope can reveal.

And it turns out that Hooke had trained as an artist, so he made these amazing detailed drawings of what you could see with these newfangled devices.

But what's really cool is that he didn't start with a picture of magnified plant cells or a snowflake or anything like that.

Observations might inspire wonders, or might inspire devotion at the tiny wonders God had wrought, but there was no reason to think that they had any import, much less import that the telescope had had.

The first detailed microscopic illustrations were produced by Robert Hooke and his Micrographia.

Inspired by it and the usefulness of microscopes for his own trade, cloth merchant Anthony van Leeuwenhoek crafted his own lenses.

Each of his microscopes, It's a replica, it's not the real one.