Whose Microscope Revealed Cells?

In 1665, English polymath Robert Hooke published Micrographia, one of the first major works of microscopy. Examining a thin slice of cork, he observed tiny box-like compartments that he named "cells" (from the Latin "cella," meaning small room). However, what he saw were actually the dead cell walls of plant tissue. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch draper with no formal scientific training, built single-lens microscopes of superior quality (magnifying up to 275x) and, from the 1670s, became the first person to observe living single-celled organisms ("animalcules"), bacteria, sperm cells, and blood cells. Together, their work founded the field of cell biology.