Ask who invented the compound microscope and most short answers name a Dutch spectacle maker working around 1590, either Hans Lippershey or Zacharias Janssen. Both names are worth knowing. Neither answer is well supported.
The entire case rests on one piece of testimony, given in 1655 by a man named Johannes Zachariassen, who claimed his late father Zacharias Janssen had built the first compound microscope some sixty five years earlier. Zacharias himself had died decades before, and left no account of his own. Historians who have examined the claim closely, among them Van Helden, Dupre, Van Gent and Zuidervaart, concluded that Johannes invented the story, apparently for the fame and the financial advantage of being able to say his family had invented an instrument that by 1655 had become genuinely important to science. Even Zacharias's birth year is not securely known; sources place it anywhere from 1580 to 1588, which would have made him somewhere between two and ten years old at the moment he is supposed to have built a working optical instrument.
Compare that with what is actually documented about Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, working nearly a century later. Leeuwenhoek ground his own lenses, built his own single lens microscopes, reaching magnifications well beyond the compound instruments of his day, and described exactly what he saw in some 560 letters, most of them sent directly to the Royal Society in London, whose members could and did ask him questions about his methods. He is the first confirmed person to have seen bacteria, protozoa and spermatozoa, and there is no equivalent gap of decades between the claimed event and the first account of it.
The lesson is not that Lippershey or Janssen definitely did not build an early microscope. It is that an attribution can outlive the evidence for it by centuries simply because it arrived first and sounded plausible, while a far better documented achievement sits one generation later, waiting for the popular story to catch up to what the record actually supports.