Picture the scene: Athens, 350 B.C., and Aristotle is reclining in his chair in Plato's Academy. Leaning back to scratch his unruly beard, Aristotle notices a large pink-spotted gecko on the marble ceiling above him. The gecko scampers away faster than 1 meter per second, leaving Aristotle wondering how the lizard manages to stick to the polished surface. He made a note of its climbing ability in his "Historia Animalium."
A radical free thinker and arguably the world's first biologist, Aristotle nevertheless had no hope of discovering the gecko's secret.
For one thing, it would take about 1,900 years before the light microscope was invented, while the electron microscope only came along in the 1930s. Without such magnification power, Aristotle couldn't know that the gecko's feet and toes were covered in millions of microscopic hairs.