Woonhuis Antoni - Wandeling Antoni

Residence, Hippolytusbuurt
Antoni and his wife Barbara had five children; Barbara died in 1666. In this house, he started a shop in linen, yarn and tape. He also made all his discoveries there and died there. Only the plaque on the facade reminds us of its famous occupant. Peter the Great and the future king of England James II and many other dignitaries visited Antoni van Leeuwenhoek here.

Van Leeuwenhoek and the microscope
In 1648, Van Leeuwenhoek gets his hands on a magnifying glass for the first time: a magnifying glass for the textile trade that he needs as a cloth merchant to determine the quality of cloth. Van Leeuwenhoek is not the inventor of the microscope. Researchers such as Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680) and Robert Hooke (1635-1703) used a compound microscope with eyepiece and objective before, but the magnifying power of these devices are dwarfed by the strong lenses Van Leeuwenhoek will make. The microscopes Antoni van Leeuwenhoek makes consist of a single lens, with a 'pricker' on which the object to be examined was impaled. Thus, Hooke's compound microscope magnified only 30×, while the magnifying power of Van Leeuwenhoek's single microscope could reach 270×. There was a lot of knowledge about lenses in Delft; lens grinders and telescope makers lived near Van Leeuwenhoek.

Self-cut lenses
In 2018, researchers at TU Delft and Rijksmuseum Boerhaave solved this riddle of the exceptional quality of his microscopes. The quality of Van Leeuwenhoek's lenses was due to meticulous grinding and not to a sophisticated glass-blowing method, as was long thought.