*promote the scienceness

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Wednesday, August 10th, 2016 5:17am PDT - promote requested by artician.

and then they burned him alive

Actually he lived to 90 and died of a rare disease, named after him, after sending detailed observations of the illness to the Royal Society.

Delft was pretty tolerant during the 17th Century (aka the Dutch Golden Age).

Imagine the type of guy he must have been. It's the 17th century, he must be a rich nobleman of some sort because he's clearly got the money and faculties necessary to create a high precision (for the time) device. He's doing well if he can read and write, so he's presumably an educated, sensible, respected person. He creates a device that he knows will magnify things and let him see things no one has ever seen.

The dirty bastard then masturbates onto the device and, holding it millimetres from his face, writes the sordid escapade down and sends it off to a bunch of super-intellectuals. Probably laughing maniacally the whole time.

I'm sure everyone would eventually be interested enough to wank onto it, but would you write it down and tell people!? It's the sort of thing you'd do but not take credit for. You'd just hint at it as you mentioned it to the scientists -

Dear learned sir,

Here's a new invention ... bet someone knocks one out on it sooner or later - not me, someone else. Filthy bastards...... be interesting though.

PS. Try it.

Seriously, worst case you have a scientifically justified tug?

PPS. Maybe give it a wash before you send it back

So you're saying if the church of science did baptisms, it would be a collective microbial release?

He simply used what he had 'on hand'.