Do First: The Wacky History of the Cell Theory

The microscope soon became a hot item that every naturalist or scientist at the time wanted to play with, making it much like the iPad of its day.

One such person was a fellow Dutchman by the name of , who heard about microscopes, & instead of going out & buying one, . It was a strange little contraption indeed, as it looked more like a tiny paddle the size of a sunglass lens.

Once Leeuwenhoek had his microscope ready, he went to town, looking at anything & everything he could with them, including the gunk on his teeth. Yes, you heard right. He actually discovered by looking at dental scrapings, which, when you keep in mind that people didn't brush their teeth much -- if at all -- back then, he must have had a lovely bunch of bacteria to look at.

When he wrote about his discovery, he didn't call them bacteria, as we know them today. But he called them "

," because they looked like little animals to him.

While Leeuwenhoek was staring at his teeth gunk, he was also sending letters to a scientific colleague in England, by the name of .

Hooke was a guy who really loved all aspects of science, so he dabbled in a little bit of everything, including physics, chemistry and biology. Thus it is Hooke who we can thank for the term "the cell," as he was looking at a piece of cork under his microscope, and the little chambers he saw reminded him of cells,

. Think college dorm rooms, but without the TVs, computers and really annoying roommates. Hooke was something of an underappreciated scientist of his day -- something he brought upon himself, as he made the mistake of locking horns with one of the most famous scientists ever, Sir Isaac Newton.

Remember when I said Hooke dabbled in many different fields? Well, after Newton published a groundbreaking book on how planets move due to gravity, Hooke made the claim that Newton had been inspired by Hooke's work in physics. Newton, to say the least, did not like that, which sparked a tense relationship between the two that lasted even after Hooke died, as quite a bit of Hooke's research -- as well as his only portrait -- was ... misplaced, due to Newton. Much of it was rediscovered, thankfully, after Newton's time, but not his portrait, as, sadly, no one knows what Robert Hooke looked like.