Microscope Coloring Page

The microscope is usually credited to Hans and Zacharias Janssen, Dutch spectacle makers who around 1590 put lenses in a tube and found that small things looked much bigger. Nobody is sure who was first, since other lens makers in the Netherlands were trying the same thing at about the same time.

The real surprises came in the 1670s, when a Dutch cloth merchant named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used tiny lenses he ground himself and became the first person to see bacteria. Later microscopes showed that germs cause many diseases, and that changed medicine.