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Aristotle ran the Lyceum, a school of science, which the main goal was to try to exceed anything that had gone before. He had the first science department ever. Without this school, no approach to science would of been made for at least 2,000 years.
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Zacharias Jansen invented the compound microscope which uses two lenses instead of one to have a greater magnification. Without the compound microscope, people would have never been able to look at and discover cells.
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Jan Baptist van Helmontidentified carbon dioxide and recognized that many reactions produce gases. This steered people away from thinking that gases appeared out of nowhere.
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Robert Hooke discovered the Law of Elasticity which states that stretching a solid material is proportional to the force that is applied to it.
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek improved the microscope to have a magnification of 500x which let him be able to see sperm cells. This discovery made scientists question where life came from.
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Lorenz Oken stated that all organisms come from and consist of cells, the first statement of cell theory. This lead to scientists later testing his theory.
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Robert Brown dicovered the nucleus in plant cells. He realized that it was a component of ALL plant cells.
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Matthias Schleiden recognized how important the nucleus was and thought it was connected to cell division in some way but later discoveries proved him wrong.
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Theodor Schwann extended Matthias Schleiden's theory that all plants are made of cells to the theory that all living things are made of cells.
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Albrecht von Roelliker proved that sperm cells and egg cells are also cells.
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Rudolf Virchow discovered that diseases actually arose from individual cells inside the organ and tissue, which means that all cells come from existing cells. This shows people that diseases actually come from cells instead of appearing out of nowhere.
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Louis Pasteur boiled meat broth in a flask and heated the neck of it until it became pliable and bent it into an 'S' shape so that air could get throught to the broth but microorganisms couldn't. Nothing grew. He then tilted the flask so the airborn microorganisms could reach the broth and it rapidly got cloudier. This discovery shows that the spread of bacteria can be controlled.
