title: van Leeuwenhoek microscopes-where are they now?
abstract: When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek died, he left over 500 simple microscopes, aalkijkers (an adaption of his microscope to allow the examination of blood circulation in the tails of small eels) and lenses, yet now there are only 10 microscopes with a claim to being authentic, one possible aalkijker and six lenses. He made microscopes with more than one lens, and possibly three forms of the aalkijker. This paper attempts to establish exactly what he left and trace the fate of some of the others using the earliest possible documents and publications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biotechnology, Delft University of Technology, 2628 BC, Delft, the Netherlands l.a.robertson@tudelft.nl.
authors.forename: Lesley A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Robertson
mesh_terms: D049670:History, 17th Century; D008853:Microscopy / Q000266:history* / Q000295:instrumentation
keywords: aalkijker; auction catalogue; biohistory; single lens microscopes