Google has a new doodle on their homepage today, celebrating the, er, 384th birthday of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch textile salesman considered the first microbiologist.
Van Leeuwenhoek designed a single-lens microscope which he used to observe what he famously called "little animals" - single cell organisms that we now know as bacteria and other microbes.
The famous phrase came from a letter to the Royal Society of London, in which van Leeuwenhoek marveled at what he had seen in a sample of water from a nearby lake.
On its Doodle page, Google says, "In his rooms on the Market Square in Delft, Netherlands, van Leeuwenhoek was a DIY-er supreme. Like Galileo, he ground and polished his own lenses. Some of his lenses attained a magnification of more than 200 times, allowing him to examine capillaries, muscle fibers, and other wonders of the microscopic universe."
Google Doodler Gerben Steenks noted, "I chose to make it an animated Doodle to show the 'before and after' experience that Antoni van Leeuwenhoek had — looking through a microscope and seeing a surprising new world."
The Dutch textile salesman was also the first person to discover, using his microscope, spermatozoa.