This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Nicolaas Hartsoeker is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
Nicolaas Hartsoeker (26 March 1656, Gouda - 10 December 1725, Utrecht) was a Dutch mathematician and physicist who invented the screw-barrel simple microscope1 circa 1694.
Nicolaas was the son of Christiaan Hartsoeker (1626-1683), a Remonstrant minister in Moordrecht near Gouda. His father would take the family to Alkmaar in 1661 and finally to Rotterdam in 1669. Nicolaas started to make a living as a lensmaker in Rotterdam, and was instructed in optics by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. In 1674, he and a fellow student, assisted by Van Leeuwenhoek, were the first to observe semen, a situation that would later lead to a priority dispute between Hartsoeker and Leeuwenhoek over the discovery of spermatozoids.
In 1677, Hartsoeker met Huygens, who he initiated in the making of lenses. In June 1678, Hartsoeker accompanied Huygens to Paris in the role as an assistant, where they made a great impression with their microscopes. Huygens failed to mention Hartsoeker even once in his publication in France however, leading to a fall-out between the two2.
Hartsoeker returned to Rotterdam, where he married. His business as an instrument maker and wine merchant failed and in 1684 he moved his family to Paris, where he made instruments for the observatory and the academy, there to remain until 1698 2.
It is often said that in 1694, while observing human sperm through a microscope, Hartsoeker believed that he saw tiny men inside the sperm, which he called homunculi or animalcules. However, he only postulated their existence as part of his Spermist theory of conception and never claimed to have seen them3. The 1694 "Essay on dioptrics", in which this hypothesis appearscitation needed, was a highly-lauded book, in fact tackling several misconceptions of the time. For example, Hartsoeker disavows the contemporary position (e.g. of Robert Hooke) that with refractor telescopes one soon would be able to see man-sized creatures on the moon, if any in fact existed2.
At the end of the century, Hartsoeker had become quite famous. In 1699 he was elected member of the French and in 1704 of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, in both cases as one of the first foreign members. Czar Peter met him in Amsterdam and offered him the chair of mathematics in St Petersburg. Hartsoeker did not accept, but the czar did finance an observatory for him in Amsterdam. Later, in 1704, Hartsoeker accepted the offer of Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine to become "first mathematician and honorary professor of philosophy"who? at the University of Heidelberg. The last years of his life were spent in Utrecht2.
Bibliography
- Essai de dioptrique, 1694.
- Principes de physique, 1696.
- Traité de physique, 1696.
References
- ^ Molecular Expressions Microscopy Primer: Museum of Microscopy - Hartsoeker Screw-Barrel Microscope
- ^ a b c d Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, "Constructive thinking: a case for dioptrics" in The Mindful Hand, History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands, vol. 9, pp. 59-82.
- ^ K.A. Hill Hartsoeker's Homonculus: a corrective note J Hist Behav Sci. 1985 Apr;21(2):178-9.
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 15 August 2008, at 13:13.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Nicolaas Hartsoeker".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.