In 1676, Monerans were first discovered under light microscope by a Dutch scientist, Antonie

van Leeuwenhoek. By improving the microscope, he laid the foundation for microbiology
and is often cited as the first microbiologist to study bacteria and spermatozoa.
However, he called the bacteria “animalcules” and assigned them to class Vermes of
Kingdom Animalia. He was able to isolate them from different sources, such as rainwater,
pond and well water, and the human mouth and intestine. He also calculated their sizes.
Due to lack of tools and technology, the description of Monera and their classification was
extremely limited. In this era, monerans were not given much importance.
In 1866, most microorganisms were included in kingdom Protista by Ernst Haeckel. He was a
German biologist who discovered and named thousands of new species, mapped a
genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including the term
‘Protista’. Haeckel was also a supporter of evolution. He promoted and popularised Charles
Darwin's work in Germany (The Origin of Species).
One of his eight major divisions of Protista was composed of the monerans (called Moneres
by Haeckel), which he defined as completely structureless and homogeneous organisms,
consisting only of a piece of plasma. Haeckel's Monera included not only bacterial groups,
but also several small eukaryotic organisms; in fact the genus Vibrio is the only bacterial
genus explicitly assigned to the phylum, while others are mentioned indirectly.
Although Haeckel's ideas are important to the history of evolutionary theory, many
speculative concepts that he championed are now considered incorrect. For example, Haeckel
described and named hypothetical ancestral microorganisms that have never been found. He
was considered a flamboyant figure, who sometimes took great, non-scientific leaps from
available evidence.
This led Herbert Copeland to speculate that Haeckel considered all bacteria to belong to the
genus Vibrio, ignoring other bacterial genera. (One notable exception were the members of
the modern phylum Cyanobacteria, which were placed in the phylum Archephyta of Algae.)
Copeland is responsible for officially raising Monera to kingdom status. His four-kingdom
scheme (Monera, Protoctista, Animalia, and Plantae) had the advantage of clearly separating
microbes with nuclei (Protoctista) from those without (Monera: the prokaryotes—that is, the
bacteria and archaea).
In the late nineteenth century, German naturalist and botanist Ferdinand Cohn began to
systematically organize bacteria into genera and species. Although Cohn’s arrangement of the
bacteria was based on morphology, he recognized that bacteria could not be adequately
classified by morphology alone.
The Neolatin noun Monera and the German noun Moneren/Moneres are derived from the
ancient Greek noun moneres which Haeckel states to mean "simple", however it actually
means "single, solitary". Haeckel also describes the protist genus Monas in the two pages
about Monera in his 1866 book.
The term Monera became well established in the 20s and 30s. In 1925 Édouard Chatton
divided all living organisms into two empires (Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes): the Kingdom
Monera being the sole member of the Prokaryotes empire.
The anthropic importance of the crown group of animals, plants and fungi was hard to
depose. Consequently, several other megaclassification schemes ignored on the empire rank
but maintained the kingdom Monera consisting of bacteria, such Copeland in 1938 and
Whittaker in 1969.
Robert Whittaker, a distinguished American plant ecologist, was the first to propose the five-
kingdom taxonomic classification. Whittaker's system placed most single celled organisms
into either the prokaryotic Monera or the eukaryotic Protista. The other three kingdoms in his
system were the eukaryotic Fungi, Animalia, and Plantae. Whittaker, however, did not
believe that all his kingdoms were monophyletic.
In 1977, a PNAS paper by Carl Woese and George Fox demonstrated that the archaea
(initially called archaebacteria) are not significantly closer in relationship to the bacteria than
they are to eukaryotes. The paper received front-page coverage in The New York Times, and
great controversy initially. The conclusions have since become accepted, leading to
replacement of the kingdom Monera with the two kingdoms Bacteria and Archaea.
Bacteria and Archaea are superficially similar; for example, they do not have intracellular
organelles, and they have circular DNA. However, they are fundamentally distinct, and their
separation is based on the genetic evidence for their ancient and separate evolutionary
lineages, as well as fundamental differences in their chemistry and physiology. Members of
these two prokaryotic domains are as different from one another as they are from eukaryotic
cells.
A minority of scientists, including Thomas Cavalier-Smith, continue to reject the widely
accepted division between these two groups. Cavalier-Smith has published classifications in
which the archaebacteria are part of a subkingdom of the Kingdom Bacteria.