Look at something very small — what appears?

That time, that place

Hooke was Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society — a post that required him to prepare and perform something new at every meeting. He was superbly handy, and his attention never stayed in one place.

Why this question

If the telescope pulled the far near, the microscope opens the opposite door — onto what is too small to see.

The question was what to look at. He examined whatever came to hand: a shaving of cork, a flea, a louse, a fly's eye, the point of a needle, a printed full stop.

What was found

Slicing cork very thin, he found it packed with little chambers like a honeycomb. He borrowed the word for a monk's small room and called them cells. What he had seen were the walls of dead plant tissue, but the name stuck.

Micrographia carried large fold-out plates. Opened up, the flea spanned an arm's length. People saw for the first time what lived on their own bodies — the armored segments, the bristles, the hooked claws.

The book sold. No book of science had sold like that before.

Terms on this card

The cell