Which Dutch fabric merchant, surveyor, wine assayer, and minor city official, learned to grind lenses for simple microscopes and discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic microscopic protists, sperm cells, blood cells and microscopic nematodes?
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was largely self-taught in science. He was one of the first microbiologists, best known for his pioneering work in microscopy and for his contributions toward the establishment of microbiology as a scientific discipline. Huygens (1629-1695) was a Dutch physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor, and a major figure in the scientific revolution of the era; Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Dutch philosopher and one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe; Lorentz (1853-1928) shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect, and also derived the transformation equations underpinning Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.
When the Dutch seafarer, explorer, and merchant Abel Tasman set sail in 1642 under instructions from the Dutch East India Company, what places (as they are now known) did he record as having visited and having been the first European to do so?
Which Scotsman, a self-made man, merchant and yachtsman who created a tea brand, was a persistent challenger for the America's Cup?
Who was the merchant sea-captain who made the first American circumnavigation of the world in 1790, and is known for trading voyages to the northern Pacific coast of North America between 1790 and 1793, which pioneered the fur trade in that region?
Which city was founded in 1624 as a commercial trading post by the Dutch, who called it New Amsterdam, and was a nation's capital from 1785 until 1790?
