The Magnificent Microscope and the Fabulous Flea

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

Host: When was the last time you had the chance to look at something up close? How close? What about really, really close?

[Theme music begins] 

Welcome to If Objects Could Talk, the podcast where art and artifacts come alive to tell their side of the story. Today, you’ll have to get in close because we’re hearing from something small. It’s so small you’d struggle to see it if it wasn’t pinned in place by a piece of glass.

That’s right, our friend lives on the slide for a microscope. They’re a flea from a cat, which I know because the words “flea from a cat” are written in French right there on the slide in very fancy handwriting. [pencil scratch]

[Upbeat classical music plays]

This slide has been stored in the case alongside a French compound microscope that was made around 1751. The microscope has delicate glass lenses and shiny gilded bronze decorations made in the Rococo style. That’s a word that is as fun to say as it is to look at. The microscope is objectively magnificent. Our guest, meanwhile, is—well, a flea.

Flea: Greetings, one and all! I am the flea on the slide, specimen, subject, star! [triumphant music]

You may now cheer! [sound of crickets] Hmph. Crickets for a flea? Maybe you haven’t heard, but I’m a pretty big deal. If I wasn’t, why would they make my permanent dig so fancy?

Let me tell you about my home. [laughs and then sighs] I live in the drawer inside a case of a very fancy microscope. It was made in Paris around 1751. There are 10 like it that we know of, and one of them even belonged to Louis the 15th, King of France. [triumphant music] His collection had some of the finest scientific instruments in the land.

[Mellow classical music plays]

This microscope was not just for looking at things. It was a status symbol with every detail executed to reflect that. The case is wood covered with gilded leather and gilt bronze hinges and clasps. Along with the extra lenses for the microscope and tiny tweezers, the microscope is equipped with a wide range of accessories for its use that are still in the case. There are also other glass slides like mine that hold other specimens, like geranium petals, a strand of hair, fly wings. [fly buzzes] Poor guy. And an ant. I do not speak to the ant.

Ant: Hey! [garbled chatter]

Flea: The ant thinks it’s so cool because it can carry 50 times its own body weight. Congratulations! I can jump 150 times my body length! [bouncing sounds] Do the math, ant. Do the math.

I’m distracted. Oh, well, it is in my nature to jump from thing to thing. Hmph.

[Light classical music plays]

When the microscope case is open, [case creaks open] you will see it is lined with green silk velvet. Not cotton, not felt—silk velvet. So luxurious, so opulent. You have to open this case with the appropriate level of awe and appreciation for Rococo.

Rococo isn’t just a mouthful, it’s an eyeful. Rococo is a style that was fashionable in Europe in the 1700s. It emphasized the beauty of nature, like seashells and leaves and swirls and curlicues on absolutely everything. Oh! [Classical music chord]

This microscope stands on four feet shaped like acanthus leaves. Big curling leaves twisting into elegant C shapes. The body is gilded bronze, which means bronze with a layer of gold on top. [high pitch twinkle] The lens tube is covered in green shagreen, which is polished shark skin. [water moves] At the top, the lens tube. In the middle, gears and dials so precise they still turn smoothly today, [gears shifting] more than 270 years later.

If you’ve ever seen a microscope or used one at school, or a science center or a museum, you’d recognize mine. Although I highly doubt yours was this gold, this fancy, or this great that it would still work centuries later. My fancy microscope and the others like it weren’t the only ones around at the time. There were simpler ones, less gilded, less shark-skin-y. [voice yawns] Those were accessible to a much wider range of people: a scholar, a physician [a page turns and voice says “Say ahh…”] a monk or a nun in a monastery [monks singing] with a library and a love of the natural world. Curiosity does not require gold fittings. After all, this was the Age of Enlightenment!

[Triumphant classical music plays]

People building instruments to ask questions the naked eye could not answer. This microscope—my microscope—has three lenses working together in sequence. [mechanical shifting] Each one takes what the last one showed and makes it larger and clearer. That’s why it’s called a compound microscope, multiple lenses working together to show what none of them could show alone, opening up a cosmos that was hidden before, a fascinating world of the incredibly small, and in my case, the incredibly good-looking. [bell chimes]

To see through these lenses, you need light. In the daytime, the microscope was placed near a window to catch sunlight, and in the evening, candles were needed.

[Classical music continues]

Imagine it: Paris, 1751, a candlelit room, the scratch of a quill on paper, someone making notes about what appears under the glass. They’re pressing one eye to the brass tube, the other squeezed shut, and suddenly, there I am: the flea, gorgeous, magnificent, total package, my adorable cat-like whiskers, my body like a polished suit of armor. [metallic clunk]

It’s giving: hero. [triumphant trumpet] You know, someone called me a knight once. [voice says “no way.”] It’s true. I’ll tell you about it later.

Uh, back to the someone with his eye pressed to the brass tube. Who was that someone? It was Michel Ferdinand d’Albert d’Ailly, Duc de Chaulnes. That is a name you say slowly and with your chin slightly raised, if you are fortunate enough to have a chin. Let’s say that together, and if you have a chin, lift it a little higher: Michel Ferdinand d’Albert d’Ailly, Duc de Chaulnes.

Nice! The Duc de Chaulnes was a pioneering scientist. [typing sounds] He made major discoveries in optics, geography, astronomy, and physics. He was invited to join the Academy of Sciences, the official group for important thinkers like the Duc. [triumphant horns]

[Classical music resumes]

He was also very close with King Louis the 15th, and helped design the cabinet of curiosities for the king. He even invented the micrometric stage, a cutting edge tool that enabled the very precise measurement of specimens. What a gift to science! Oh. [sighs] The Duc might have kept his microscope in what was called a cabinet de curiosité, a small room that held a private collection of natural marvels. [voices say “ooh!”] Like shells, bones, feathers, and other specimens. Specimens like me! [triumphant horns]

Well, at least they tried to be like me. You do what you can with what you’ve got. Let me tell you a story about that.

[Classical music resumes]

[crickets chirping] Outside the Paris city limits, the light in the countryside was long and golden through the windows. A boy, maybe 10 years old, had been running through the home, causing mayhem. I could hear him from my case. [child running and laughing]

I overheard his father tell him to go outside and bring back subjects for scientific investigation. That did the trick, because the boy ran out of the door and did not return for almost two hours. Nice and quiet. When the boy came back inside, bringing the noise and mud with him, he did not return empty-handed. [crickets chirp and door shuts] He had several teeny-tiny objects for review under the microscope: a sliver of tree bark, assorted flower petals in different sizes and colors, a clump of dirt, and a leaf.

His father went to his desk and opened the microscope case. [door creeks open] The green silk velvet, the gleaming instrument. [gasps] One by one, the two of them placed these little collected treasures on the microscope, and the boy pressed his eye to the tube and saw a new world unfold: craters in the bark, rivers of veins through the flower petal and leaf, and tiny crystals in the spattering of soil.

When they ran out of the garden things to look at, they reached for my slide, because I am a headlining act, you know! [triumphant horns] The boy was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “It’s armored! [metal clinks] It has armor like a knight and whiskers like a cat.” [cat meows] And then he said the best thing of all! He said I have so much character! [cheers exuberantly] Boy, that made me feel good. I might be a little guy, but I’ve got lots of character, and someone noticed! I have never forgotten that. It’s nice to be seen.

When is the last time you looked closely at something? You do know you don’t need to be a duke or have a case lined in silk velvet to ask good questions and look closely at the world. Your school may have a microscope. A science center or museum near you almost certainly does. You might even find a simple one at home, probably without a single drop of gilded bronze on it, but with every bit as much power to open that door to the small world. So here is what I want you to do: find a microscope, and when you do, find something small and seemingly ordinary, and take another look at it, a real look, the kind where you lean in and study what you’re looking at. What do you see that you have never seen before? How can you describe it? How would you draw it? Do you feel like the first scientists who got to look at things up close and then figure out how to share these new worlds with the whole big world? Do let me know what you found. I like keeping track of all the exceptional characters that might one day replace this pesky ant.

Hmph! Now, if you will excuse me, I have a slide case to get back to—silk velvet, gold fittings, the most magnificent microscope in the history of small things.

[Theme music begins]

Host: I hope you enjoyed learning about Rococo and microscopes. Join us next time when a brave cat bounds into the studio. [cat meows] To see photographs of the microscope as well as videos of it in action, visit our website at Getty dot edu slash IOCT. We’ve also got a listening guide with discussion questions and related activities there.

This episode was written by Tocarra Elise and produced by Zoe Goldman. Yeon Jin voiced the flea. Theme music, mixing, and sound design by Alexandra Kalinowski. Christopher Sprinkle is executive producer. Special thanks to curators Anne-Lise Desmas and Miriam Schefzyk, as well as Rebekkah Hart.

These stories are historical fiction. They’re based on historical facts and deep research, but we’ve filled in the gaps to make a good story. If you have questions about what you’ve heard, write to us at podteam at getty dot edu. Catch you next time!