tl;dr: Leeuwenhoek's lenses, for centuries a mystery, were finally revealed by neutron irradiation to have been made by the same technique Hooke described in Mi

tl;dr: Leeuwenhoek's lenses, for centuries a mystery, were finally revealed by neutron irradiation to have been made by the same technique Hooke described in Micrographia. His innovation was to look into things nobody thought would have anything interesting to see.