In this video, we're going to focus on the discovery of microorganisms. It turns out that humans were not always aware that microorganisms even existed, let alone that they exist in pretty much every conceivable environment around us. The existence of microorganisms was actually discovered just a couple of hundred years ago during the time period between 1665 and 1674.
In 1665, an English microscopist named Robert Hooke was actually the very first person to visualize and depict or create a drawing of a microorganism. More specifically, Robert Hooke described a common bread mold known as mucore as a microscopical mushroom. If you take a look at the image down below over here on the left-hand side, there's a little portrait of Robert Hooke, who lived from 1635 to 1703. Here is an image of Hooke's microscope that he used to visualize the very first microorganism and depict the very first microorganism. Over here on the right is Robert Hooke's drawing of the bread mold, his depiction of the bread mold.
Now in 1674, just a few years later, a Dutch merchant named Antony van Leeuwenhoek analyzed a drop of lake water with a microscope and he saw microbes, many different types of microbes other than just these microscopical mushrooms. Antony van Leeuwenhoek described and depicted protozoa, which are very small eukaryotic organisms. We'll talk about them more later in our course. He also depicted bacteria, which are very small prokaryotic organisms. Again, we'll talk more about those later in our course. Antony van Leeuwenhoek depicted a whole different set of microorganisms and called these microorganisms animalcules, which really just means little animals.
If you take a look at the image down below, you can see a portrait of Antony van Leeuwenhoek, who lived from 1632 to 1723. Here is an image of Antony van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope that he used to visualize the protozoa and bacteria. Here is an image of the depictions that Antony van Leeuwenhoek created when he observed that lake water. Again, he called them animalcules or little animals, and you can see that there are many different types of protozoa and bacteria that he had drawn in his images.
While Robert Hooke observed a microscopical mushroom, a common bread mold, which is a little bit larger than these other protozoa and bacteria were, they are still at the microscopic scale. Both deserve equal credit for revealing the microbial world. Due to Robert Hooke and Antony van Leeuwenhoek's discoveries, they revealed that there was a microbial world of really small organisms and infectious agents that were all around us.
This concludes our lesson on discovering microorganisms, and we'll be able to get some practice applying these concepts as we move forward in our course. So, I'll see you all in our next video.