Intellect PlusScientists, inventors and mathematicians
349 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 6.
Lord Kelvin became a Glasgow professor at 22 and stayed for 53 yearsWilliam Thomson began university at ten, took a professor's chair at 22, and pinned absolute zero near minus 273.15 degrees Celsius. Along the way he helped lay the transatlantic …
Louis Agassiz lived in a hut on a glacier to prove ice ages happenedIn 1837 a Swiss naturalist was expected to lecture about fossil fish. Instead Louis Agassiz stunned his audience by arguing that giant ice sheets had once smothered the Northern H…
Daguerre's first street photographs of Paris seemed eerily empty of peopleWhen Samuel Morse saw early daguerreotypes of busy Paris boulevards, he was baffled: not a single person, horse or carriage appeared. Exposures took ten minutes or more, so anythi…
A history graduate turned physicist proposed that electrons travel as wavesLouis de Broglie took his first degree in history and spent World War I tending radio gear on the Eiffel Tower. Then, in his 1924 doctoral thesis, he suggested that every moving p…
Before germs, Pasteur's first great find was left-handed and right-handed crystalsLouis Pasteur is remembered for pasteurised milk and the rabies vaccine, yet some historians rate a much earlier discovery as his deepest. Peering at tiny crystals of tartaric aci…
Boltzmann's tombstone carries the entropy formula his rivals refused to acceptLudwig Boltzmann explained heat and disorder by counting the countless ways atoms can arrange themselves. Many leading scientists of his day denied atoms existed at all, and he sp…
Twitching frog legs gave Luigi Galvani a place in the dictionaryIn 1780 a Bologna anatomist watched the legs of a dead frog jerk when an electric spark struck them. Luigi Galvani spent more than a decade chasing what he called animal electrici…
Marie Curie's wedding dress was dark blue, and she wore it in the labShe studied at a secret university in Warsaw, bundled herself in every piece of clothing she owned to survive Paris winters, and married in a plain blue outfit that became her wor…
Barred from research ships, Marie Tharp mapped the ocean floor from a deskWomen were not allowed aboard research ships, so Marie Tharp worked from depth soundings brought back by male colleagues. In 1952 she spotted a valley running along the spine of t…
Lise Meitner explained nuclear fission, and the Nobel went to her partnerOver Christmas 1938, exiled in Sweden, Lise Meitner and her nephew worked out what Otto Hahn's puzzling Berlin results meant: uranium nuclei were splitting in two. They named it f…
Konrad Zuse built a working programmable computer in his parents' Berlin flatBored by the endless hand calculations of aircraft design, a young Berlin engineer started building a calculating machine in his parents' living room. Konrad Zuse's Z3, switched o…
Kurt Gödel proved that mathematics can never fully prove itselfAt 25, Kurt Gödel wrote a formula that effectively says: I cannot be proved. If it could be proved it would be false, so any consistent system rich enough for arithmetic must cont…
Léon Foucault quit medicine over blood and proved the Earth turnsLéon Foucault gave up medical school because he could not stand the sight of blood. In 1851 he hung a long, heavy pendulum from the dome of the Panthéon in Paris and let visitors …
Lee de Forest amplified the electronic age and lost four fortunes doing itLee de Forest's three-element Audion tube of 1908 was the first practical electronic amplifier, opening the way to radio broadcasting, long-distance phone lines and talking pictur…
Leo Baekeland sold a photo paper to Kodak, then invented plasticA cobbler's son from Ghent, Leo Baekeland got rich selling his Velox photographic paper to George Eastman, then was barred from photography research for 20 years. So he turned to …- Leonhard Euler gave mathematics much of the notation it still writes todayEvery time a student writes pi for a circle, sigma for a sum or e for natural growth, they are borrowing notation Leonhard Euler made standard. He produced 866 publications, found…
Linus Pauling left school without a diploma and won two unshared NobelsLinus Pauling walked out of high school at 15 without a diploma because the principal wouldn't let him double up on history classes. He went on to explain how atoms bond, won the …
Linus Torvalds wanted to call it Freax until a friend picked LinuxIn 1991 a Helsinki student posted a hobby operating system kernel on his university's FTP server. He wanted to call it Freax; the friend who ran the server named the folder linux …- Gay-Lussac rode a hydrogen balloon over 7 kilometres up to sample the skyIn 1804 Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac floated alone to 7,016 metres in a hydrogen balloon, collecting air to see whether the atmosphere changes with height. The same chemist named iodin…
- Lagrange found Greek geometry dull until a stray paper hooked him at seventeenAs a law student in Turin, Giuseppe Lagrangia preferred Latin and found geometry boring. At seventeen he stumbled on a paper by Edmond Halley, taught himself mathematics in a year…
Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen, invented soda water, and refused to believe either mattered to chemistry's revolutionJoseph Priestley isolated oxygen in 1774 and gave the world fizzy water, yet he spent his later career defending the old phlogiston theory against the new chemistry his own gas ha…- Willard Gibbs worked unpaid at Yale while reshaping physics and chemistryFor nearly a decade Yale's professor of mathematical physics drew no salary, and his first papers appeared in a local journal few could follow. Yet Willard Gibbs co-founded statis…
Justus von Liebig invented the teaching lab in an old army guardroomJustus von Liebig lived through the famine of 1816 as a boy of 13. He grew up to show that plants are held back by whichever nutrient is scarcest, earning the title father of the …
A dropout schoolteacher who also taught gymnastics became the father of modern analysisKarl Weierstrass left university without a degree and spent years teaching mathematics, botany and gymnastics in small Prussian towns. From there he published work so original tha…
Konrad Lorenz let goslings imprint on him, and carried a darker pastKonrad Lorenz became famous as the man followed by a line of greylag goslings, which bond with the first moving thing they see after hatching. He shared a Nobel Prize for founding…- The father of the atomic bomb was a clumsy experimenter who hated lab workAt Cambridge, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote that lab work bored him and he was hopeless at it. He switched to theory, helped predict neutron stars and black holes, and then led the …
- The mathematician who decoded heat also first imagined the greenhouse effectJoseph Fourier was an orphaned tailor's son who survived the Terror, sailed with Napoleon to Egypt and governed a French province. In his spare hours he studied how heat spreads, …
Joseph Lister was an ordinary surgeon who made surgery survivableBy technical skill alone, Joseph Lister was nothing special in the operating theatre. What set him apart was the realisation that wounds rot because of germs. Spraying carbolic ac…
Johannes Kepler had poor eyesight, so he needed Tycho Brahe's dataJohannes Kepler fell for the sky early: at six his mother took him up high to see the Great Comet of 1577, and at nine he watched a blood-red eclipsed Moon. Then smallpox left him…
John Bardeen won two physics Nobels and gamed the committee for his coauthorsJohn Bardeen remains the only person with two Nobel Prizes in Physics. By the late 1960s he feared his coauthors on a theory of superconductivity would miss out, because the commi…
John Dalton's preserved eyeball finally settled his colour-blindness theory in 1995John Dalton guessed that his odd colour vision came from tinted fluid inside his eyeballs. He was wrong, but he was right that it ran in families, since his brother shared it. In …
Audubon's famous bird-banding story falls apart under the datesJohn James Audubon is often called America's first bird bander. In 1834 he described tying silver threads to the legs of five young eastern phoebes at his Pennsylvania farm and fi…
The first television was built from a hatbox, darning needles and bicycle lensesIn a rented workshop in Hastings, a sickly Scottish engineer cobbled together a working television from an old hatbox, scissors, darning needles, bicycle lamp lenses, a tea chest,…
John von Neumann earned two degrees at once to keep his father happyWhen 15-year-old János Neumann first met his calculus tutor Gábor Szegő, the mathematician went home with tears in his eyes at the boy's speed. His banker father still wanted a pr…
Joseph Banks paid his own way onto Cook's first Pacific voyageWhen HMS Endeavour sailed in 1768, a 25-year-old landowner named Joseph Banks brought eight people along at his own cost: two naturalists, two artists and four servants from his L…
Many Victorian garden rhododendrons came from seeds Joseph Hooker gathered in SikkimIn 1849, botanist Joseph Hooker and a British official were locked up by Sikkim's chief minister while heading for a pass into Tibet. They were freed without violence, and Hooker …
Every chemical formula you write follows a Swedish chemist's shorthandWriting Fe for iron and O for oxygen, with numbers for how many atoms join up, was Jacob Berzelius's idea. He set the numbers as superscripts; later chemists dropped them below th…
A Scottish farmer staring into ditches worked out that Earth is ancientIn 1753, James Hutton wrote that he peered with "anxious curiosity" into every pit, ditch and riverbed he passed. He was running a family farm in Berwickshire at the time, drainin…
A brewer's cost question grew into the law of conservation of energyAround 1840, James Joule was running his family's brewery in Salford and wondering whether new electric motors could replace its steam engines. He did the sums: a pound of coal bu…
Jane Goodall broke a scientific taboo by giving chimpanzees namesIn the early 1960s, researchers gave study animals numbers to avoid getting attached. Jane Goodall called hers David Greybeard, Goliath, Flo and Fifi, and wrote about their childh…- Lamarck built the first full theory of evolution and died in povertyJean-Baptiste Lamarck coined the word invertebrate, helped give biology its modern name, and in 1800 laid out one of the earliest coherent accounts of species changing over time. …
A baby left on church steps grew up to write the wave equationA few days after his birth in 1717, a Paris baby was abandoned on the steps of the church of Saint-Jean-le-Rond, and named after it. He became Jean le Rond d'Alembert, co-editor o…
L'Hôpital's rule was really Bernoulli's, sold under a tutoring contractCalculus students learn l'Hôpital's rule for tricky limits. The marquis de l'Hôpital did not discover it. He paid Johann Bernoulli to tutor him, under a contract letting him use B…
A carpenter's son without Latin measured molecules many doubted existedJohannes van der Waals couldn't enrol at university because he had never learned the classical languages. So the primary-school headmaster sat in on lectures as an outsider, until…
Gutenberg printed his famous Bible, then lost the workshop to his lenderIn 1455 Johannes Gutenberg finished his 42-line Bible, about 180 copies, most on paper and the rest on vellum. Within months his backer Johann Fust sued him for 2,026 guilders and…
Brunel was turned away from France's top engineering school and apprenticed to a watchmakerAs a foreigner, the teenage Isambard Kingdom Brunel was barred from the École Polytechnique, and Britain offered no engineering degrees. So he stayed in Paris to train under the m…
The famous alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan may never have existedHundreds of Arabic treatises on alchemy, magic and philosophy carry the name Jabir ibn Hayyan, supposedly an eighth-century disciple of a Shi'ite imam. Yet no historical source me…
Jack Kilby invented the microchip because he was too new for a vacationIn the summer of 1958, Texas Instruments emptied out for holidays, but new hire Jack Kilby had not earned any time off yet. Alone in the lab, he worked out how to build a whole ci…
Jacob Bernoulli found e by asking how fast money could growPut one dollar in an account paying 100 percent a year. Compounded once, it doubles; compounded monthly, it reaches about 2.61; daily, about 2.71. In 1683 Jacob Bernoulli noticed …- A rival mocked van 't Hoff for riding Pegasus; he won the first chemistry NobelWhen a young Dutch chemist argued that carbon's bonds point to the corners of a tetrahedron, the eminent Hermann Kolbe sneered that he had borrowed a winged horse from the veterin…
A car crash ended Cousteau's flying career and sent him underwaterJacques Cousteau trained as a French naval gunnery officer and hoped to become a pilot, until an automobile accident broke both his arms. He turned instead to the sea, co-created …
James Chadwick ran experiments with radioactive toothpaste in a prison camp stableTrapped in Germany when the First World War broke out, young physicist James Chadwick spent four years in Ruhleben internment camp near Berlin. He set up a laboratory in the stabl…
Schoolboys nicknamed James Clerk Maxwell 'Daftie' before he unified light and electricityOn his first day at Edinburgh Academy, a ten-year-old country boy arrived in homemade shoes with a rustic Galloway accent and was promptly dubbed 'Daftie'. Three years later he to…
Cavendish's leftover bubble of air turned out to be argon, a century laterIn 1785 Henry Cavendish stripped oxygen and nitrogen from a sample of air and found a tiny bubble that refused to react. He had not made a mistake. More than a hundred years later…
Helmholtz clocked nerve signals with a frog's leg and a mirrorIn 1849 most scientists assumed nerve impulses travelled too fast to measure. Hermann von Helmholtz hooked a frog's sciatic nerve to its calf muscle, bounced light off a galvanome…- Hermann Weyl invented gauge theory while trying to geometrise electromagnetismIn 1918 Hermann Weyl tried to describe gravity and electromagnetism as features of spacetime geometry. The attempt failed, but along the way he introduced the idea of a gauge, the…
An ancient Alexandrian built a coin-operated vending machine for holy waterDrop a coin into Hero's machine and it landed on a small pan, tipping a lever that opened a valve and let out a measured dose of water for ritual washing. When the coin slid off, …
Hipparchus discovered that Earth wobbles, almost by accidentThe Greek astronomer credited with founding trigonometry is best known for a side discovery: the slow drift of the equinoxes caused by Earth's precession. He also compiled the Wes…
We know surprisingly little about what the Father of Medicine actually didHippocrates of Kos is credited with freeing medicine from the gods and giving it an oath doctors still recite. Yet historians agree on little beyond his birth on Kos around 460 BC…- Humphry Davy named laughing gas and used electricity to isolate seven elementsIn 1799 a young Cornish chemist breathed nitrous oxide, found himself laughing, and dubbed it laughing gas, speculating it could dull surgical pain. Within a decade Humphry Davy w…