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Anton van Leeuwenhoek
Anton van Leeuwenhoek began building simple microscopes and was further inspired by Robert Hooke's book. He described what he saw in a drop of water as "wretched beasties". He discovered that these little creatures could stop, stand still, and turn themselves around. He eventually called these moving things "animalcules". He was one of the first people to observe microbes. -
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke developed his own version of a microscope that consisted of several parts. Because of this microscope, he was able to see dead plant tissue from the bark of the cork oak tree. He called this dead plant tissue shape cells. -
Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold
Karl was one of the many scientists that built off of Matthias Jakob Schleiden and Theodor Schwann's ideas. Karl put forward to consideration that microbes were made up of of cells. He believed that organisms that consisted of multiple cells, like animals, were built out of "single- celled microbes".
In actuality his ideas about organisms being built out of single celled microbes was wrong, however he was right in saying that microbes were living creatures. -
Matthias Jakob Schleiden
Matthias Jakob Schleiden became interested in botany and also preferred to use a microscope to study plants. He was the first person to say that plants were made up entirely of cells. Schleiden, along with another scientists were credited for developing cell theroy. -
Theodor Schwann
Theodor Schwann liked to study animals. He said that animals too are made up entirely of cells. He worked with Schleiden to create the cell theory. -
Robert Koch
Robert Koch identified the anthrax microbe. He was also able to identify the tuberculosis and cholera microbe. He performed an experiment on healthy mice and was able to conclude that specific microbes are able to cause specific diseases.
