A tradesman of Delft, Holland, he came from a family of tradesmen, had no fortune, received no higher education or university degrees, and knew no languages other than his native Dutch.
However, because of various technical difficulties in building them, early compound microscopes were not practical for magnifying objects more than about twenty or thirty times natural size.
Compound microscopes (that is, microscopes using more than one lens) had been invented around 1595, nearly forty years before Leeuwenhoek was born.
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