Robert hooked the cell

photo credits:www.archive and special collections.com & www.slate.com
Memory tags: : Realizing that 1665 was common to “Cell” and “The Girl with the Pearl,”

LONG, long, before texts and timelines endlessly repeated, “Robert Hooke discovered the cell”, there were glass blowers, glass cutters and lentil shaped glass being polished to perfection in many, many countries. By the end of the Renaissance this helped Hans Lippershay in Holland and Galileo Galilee in Florence to refine optical instruments. By 1630 these instruments were already christened the telescope and microscope. Trade, art and science flourished even when the Dutch, French and English fought wars or strove for “East Indies”.

 And so in 1665 a painting, a landmark book in science and a plague come into our story. In Delft, Holland, Johann Vermeer was carefully painting a tiny white paisley of light on the pearl. When the paint dried, the glowing pearl became immortalized in, “The Girl with the Pearl”. It represented the Dutch Golden Age in Art like Rembrandt’s paintings. Across the North Sea, Robert Hooke had his “Micrographia” published by the Royal Society of London. The Great Plague epidemic closed Cambridge University and sent Isaac Newton home to work on calculus, optics and gravity. Subsequently, after the Great Fire of 1666 King Charles II asked Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke to design a Monument to the Fire. They added a telescope in the shaft of this 202 ft tall Doric column and a laboratory under ground level. The golden urn crowning the monument was entirely Hooke’s by design; he after all was Professor of Geometry at Gresham College London and curator of experiments to the Royal Society.

Hooke’s Micrographia inspired the surveyor of the Delft city Council, Anton van Leeuwenhoek to apply his microscope to things other than inspection of textiles made from wool or caffe. It is often suggested that Leuwenhoek was the “model philosopher” for two of Vermeer’s paintings, the Astronomer and the Geographer. Though it is not substantiated, what is established that as a surveyor, Leuwenhoek was appointed trustee of Vermeer’s property after his untimely death in 1675. www.essentialvermeer.com provides excellent viewing and links.

The wonder of the world under our first magnifying glass returns as we read Micrographia now accessible on www.gutenberg.org ; Robert Hooke focuses his beautiful, handcrafted microscope over the point of a needle, razor’s edge, linen, silk, sand, wood, cork, blue mould, feathers, crystals, snowflakes, fleas, hair and flint. In Observe XVIII, Hooke writes after examining a fine section of cork: “In that these pores, or cells, were not very deep, but consisted of a great many little Boxes… I no sooner discern’d these (which were indeed the first microscopical pores I ever saw, and perhaps, that were ever seen, for I had not met with any Writer or Person, that had made any mention of them before this)”.

Thus the fact Robert hooked the cell is recorded for posterity and priority in the Micrographia, published 348 years ago as the Trobairitz tells this story. The founding secretary of the Royal Society Henry Oldenburg would draw in correspondence and publications from Marcello Malphigi in Italy, Jan Swammerdam and Anton van Leuwenhoek in Holland, thus curating the opening chapters of Cell Biology: a discipline born of and carried forward by the microscope and its associated techniques.

So, Anton van Leeuwenhoek used natural dyes from the textile industry as stains and possibly made 25 microscopes to discern the world under the microscope. New stories are often a little beyond belief, so his claim of having seen single celled animalcules, was rejected in 1676. Leeuwenhoek persisted till the Royal Society sent out a ’committee’ in time honoured style and verified his claim. In 1832 Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg rechristened Leuwenhoek’s animalcules as bacteria. Ehrenberg brings us to the century in which the next important part of the cell story would happen: connecting cell with cell theory in Berlin, Germany and bacteria with germ theory in Paris, France. Even, science cannot rush a story whose time has not come.

Main resources:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica
2. Wikipedia
3. www.essentialvermeer.com
4. www.gutenberg.or/15491-h/htm