Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [38]
When I recently held a replica of one of Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes, my first thought was, It sure ain’t pretty. It was punier than I’d expected, and the lens was—no pun intended—microscopic. But I held my tongue. I did not want to offend the man who’d made it, Al Shinn, who sat across from me in his ramshackle cottage in Berkeley, California. Al, in truth, had done a magnificent job in re-creating this seventeenth-century microscope, I knew, basing it on a Leeuwenhoek original preserved in the Utrecht Museum in the Netherlands. A specialist in designing high-tech optical instruments, Al had spent years studying the Dutchman’s notes and designs, experimenting with different metals, even replicating the device’s tiny screws, scoring the threads by hand.
For all the excitement it generated in its time, the design is pretty simple. A tiny lens—a two-millimeter glass bead—is held between two thin brass plates, which are riveted together. By way of a long screw, you hold the device up to your eye like a rectangular lollipop. The object you want to view is affixed to a metal pin on the back that can be rotated or repositioned using a second screw. Leeuwenhoek produced more than five hundred variations on this design during his lifetime and bequeathed the bulk of them to his devoted daughter, Maria, who had never married and who’d assisted him till his dying day. Following her death in 1745, they were all sold at auction, as per Maria’s request, yet only nine are known to exist today. This is sad but not surprising. An untrained eye would never guess their purpose. The replica resting in my palm looked like an obsolete carpentry tool, something you wouldn’t hesitate to toss from a junk drawer.
When Al had greeted me at his front door—my first time meeting him in person—I’d immediately thought, It’s Doc, the scientist played by Christopher Lloyd in the Back to the Future movies, the inventor of the time-traveling DeLorean. Al, who’s sixty and gray, had the same detonated hair, lively eyes, and endearing smile, as well as a similar lankiness. Wearing a T-shirt, sweats, and flip-flops, he cleared a path back to the kitchen, where he made me a nice strong cup of coffee. Al’s house, like the physical manifestation of an active mind, was filled with stuff: projects that appeared to be just started, half finished, or long since abandoned. I even spotted boxed chemistry and ham-radio kits that could’ve been from his 1950s boyhood. While he shares the two-bedroom home with his wife and only child, a teenage daughter, I saw scarce evidence of their belongings. It was easy to imagine his many, many interests squeezing out any of their own. In the press for space between old computers and piles of books and laundry, a lampshade doubled as a bulletin board, covered with Post-it notes. I pushed aside some newspapers on the couch and sank into a cushion.
As if to explain away the surroundings, Al admitted, “I’ve always been a tinkerer. Even since I was little, I’ve been interested in the instruments of science—radios, telescopes, microscopes.” He’d first been inspired to try replicating Leeuwenhoek’s microscope about ten years ago, he continued, while he was working for a Bay Area ophthalmic equipment company, Humphrey Instruments. At the time, Al was a principal research scientist for the firm, a high-level position he’d reached more from raw skill than from schooling. A college dropout in the early 1960s, he had made his living for many years as a “hippie jeweler—pipes, earrings, artsy-craftsy stuff,” a line of work that had drawn