Loading...Anyone who has taken elementary and high school science should know about the existence of bacteria; small, single-celled organisms that inhabit pretty much everywhere on Earth. They live around you, on you, even inside you, and they’re essential to all multi-cellular life on Earth. Estimates for the total world population of bacteria are currently around five million trillion trillion, or a five with 30 zeroes after it. That’s a huge number, which makes it even more surprising that we only discovered they existed a mere 346 years ago.
The reason that it took so long, of course, is that bacteria are so dang small. The fascinating video above, made by Vox, explains how bacteria were discovered and what the discoverer, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, had to do to even see it in the first place.