In almost any love story, there's this part where one person sets eyes on the other.

And suddenly, their whole world opens up.

And from that moment on, everything changes.

That is exactly what happened to Antony Van Levenhook, Chapter 1, love at first sight.

And so upon a time, 1674, to be exact, Antony Van Levenhook was living in the Netherlands,

and he was a draper.

He spent a lot of his life looking really closely at different types of fabric.

He actually ground his own teeny tiny single lens microscopes.

And Antony was also a curious guy.

So one day, he collected some water from a nearby lake and put it under one of his microscopes.

Suddenly, something very strange came into focus.

Vizarre looking creatures, world, and zipped around in that drop of water.

It was an entire tiny universe.

Some people call this story the start of microbiology.

But to me, it's the meat cube.

It's the moment when humans first set eyes on microbes.

And today, we're visiting a museum that traces the history of this small,

but big love story, through good times and bad, through sickness and health.

I'm Dylan Therese, and this is Atlas Obscura, a daily celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're going to Micropia, the world's only museum dedicated to microscopic organisms.

And we're going to learn about our invisible life companions who we truly, truly, can't live without.

...