Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656 - 1725)
Field(s) of interest: Scientific instruments | Optics | Natural Philosophy | EmbryologyGender: male
Born: Gouda, 26-03-1656
Died: Utrecht, 10-12-1725
Biography:
Optical instrument maker and natural philosopher, who invented the screw-barrel simple microscope in circa 1694. Hartsoeker worked most of his life in France. In 1699, when he returned to the Dutch Republic, he was elected member of the Academie Royale des Sciences and in 1704 of the Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, in both cases as one of the first foreign members. When Czar Peter the Great visited Amsterdam, he was offered the chair of mathematics in St Petersburg. Hartsoeker rejected this offer, but later, in 1704, Hartsoeker accepted the position of "first mathematician and honorary professor of philosophy" at the University of Heidelberg, offered to him by Johann Wilhelm, Elector the Palatine. He returned to the Netherlands around 1720. The last years of his life were spent in Utrecht.
Collections: Museum Boerhaave Leiden; Universiteitsmuseum Utrecht.
Occupations:
physicist, astronomer and instrument maker: 1678 - 1725
Honorary Professsor of Philosophy (Heidelberg)
Sources:
Bibliotheca Hartsoekeriana, sive Catalogus librorum quae collegit Nic. Hartsoeker. Librorum auctio publica fiet ad diem 16 Juni 1727 et seqq (1727).
Harting, P., Het mikroskoop : deszelfs gebruik, geschiedenis en tegenwoordige toestand; een handboek voor natuur- en geneeskundigen, vol. III (Utrecht 1850).
Rooseboom, M., Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis der instrumentmakerskunst in de noordelijke Nederlanden (Leiden 1950).
Harting, P., Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis der mikroskopen in ons vaderland (Utrecht 1846).
Fournier, M., Early microscopes : a descriptive catalogue (Leiden 2003).
Wielema, M.R. ' Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725): van mechanisme naar vitalisme', in: Gewina 15 (1992), 234-261.
Clay, S. and H. Court, The history of the microscope: compiled from original instruments and documents, up to the introduction of the achromatic microscope (London 1932).
Cittert, P. van, Geschiedenis van de verzameling antieke instrumenten van het Natuurkundig Laboratorium der Rijks Universiteit en van het Natuurkundig Gezelschap (Utrecht 1929).
Hartsoeker, N., Conjectures Physiques (Amsterdam 1707) + several later additions
Hartsoeker, N., Principes de Physique (Parijs 1696)
Hartsoeker, N., Essai de Dioptrique (Parijs 1694)
Hartsoeker, N., Recueil de plusieurs pièces de Physique où l'on fait principalement voir l'invalidité du système de Newton (Utrecht 1722)
Zuidervaart, H.J. ‘The ‘invisible technician’ made visible. Telescope making in the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Dutch Republic’ in: Alison D. Morrison-Low [et al] (eds.), From Earth-Bound to Satellite. Telescopes, Skills and Networks (Leiden/Boston: Brill 2012), 41-102.