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Science

1,604 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 17 of 27.

961. 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…
962. 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…
963. 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…
964. 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…
965. 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…
966. 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…
967. 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…
968. 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 …
969. 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…
970. 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 …
971. 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…
972. 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…
973. 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…
974. 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…
975. 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…
976. 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, …
977. 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…
978. 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…
979. 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…
980. Hypatia's death had nothing to do with the Library of AlexandriaModern retellings often link Hypatia's killing to the burning of the great Library. But the library was already gone during her lifetime. The real Hypatia was a celebrated Alexand…
981. Ibn al-Haytham may have written his Book of Optics while feigning madnessLegend says that after failing a task for Cairo's volatile caliph al-Hakim, Ibn al-Haytham pretended to be mad and lived under house arrest. In those years he produced the seven-v…
982. Irving Langmuir named plasma after blood and coined 'pathological science'Studying glowing ionised gas inside lamps, Irving Langmuir thought it resembled blood plasma and gave the state of matter its name. The Nobel-winning chemist also made light bulbs…
983. Henri Poincaré found chaos while working as a mining engineerPoincaré was called the last universalist, a mathematician at home in every branch of his subject. Studying how three bodies move under gravity, he became the first to find a dete…
984. Before his tower, Gustave Eiffel built the skeleton inside the Statue of LibertyGustave Eiffel's firm designed the tower that carries his name, but his skill with wind loads first brought him a different commission. In 1881 the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi aske…
985. Hans Bethe explained how heavy stars shine, and kept publishing into his ninetiesIn 1939 Hans Bethe worked out that heavier main-sequence stars are powered by a cycle of reactions involving carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, which earned him the 1967 Nobel Prize in …
986. Ørsted's compass discovery was no lecture-hall accidentA popular story says Hans Christian Ørsted stumbled on electromagnetism mid-lecture when a wire twitched a compass. In fact he had been hunting for a link between electricity and …
987. Hans Krebs lost his German job in 1933 and found his cycle in EnglandDismissed by the Nazi regime in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry, Hans Krebs was quickly rescued by a Cambridge biochemist. German officials let him take his lab equipment alon…
988. Harold Urey found heavy hydrogen and offered to fly one way to the MoonHarold Urey won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen. Decades later, when Apollo astronauts brought back lunar rock, he examined…
989. Heinrich Hertz proved radio waves exist and saw no use for themBetween 1886 and 1889 Heinrich Hertz generated and detected invisible electromagnetic waves, confirming a prediction by James Clerk Maxwell. He considered it purely a test of theo…
990. Hendrik Lorentz wrote the equations of relativity before Einstein explained themThe mathematics at the heart of special relativity carries the name of a Dutch physicist, Hendrik Lorentz. Working to rescue the idea of a light-carrying aether, he introduced a l…
991. Two cloudy days in Paris led Henri Becquerel to radioactivityHenri Becquerel expected sunlight to make uranium salts give off X-ray-like rays. When overcast skies in late February 1896 halted his tests, he left the wrapped plates in a drawe…
992. The Father of Railways couldn't read until he was eighteenGeorge Stephenson, whose track width became the standard gauge for most of the world's railways, grew up in a Northumberland mining village with illiterate parents and no money fo…
993. George Washington Carver picked his middle initial at random to fix a mail mix-upBorn enslaved in Missouri and kidnapped as a baby, Carver became Iowa State's first Black student and a scientist Time magazine called a Black Leonardo. Even his famous name was i…
994. The Big Bang was first proposed by a Catholic priestGeorges Lemaître was an ordained Belgian priest and a physicist. He was the first to argue that receding galaxies meant the universe is expanding, and his hypothesis of a primeval…
995. A gambling doctor wrote the first serious study of probabilityGerolamo Cardano was always short of money, so he gambled and played chess to stay solvent. Out of that habit came a book on dice that holds the first systematic treatment of prob…
996. Gilbert Lewis was nominated 41 times for a Nobel and never wonGilbert N. Lewis explained the covalent bond as a shared pair of electrons, gave chemistry its dot diagrams, and coined the word photon. His students collected Nobel Prizes by the…
997. One letter from Bertrand Russell shook Frege's life's work just before publicationGottlob Frege spent decades trying to prove that all of arithmetic could be built from pure logic. In 1903, as the second volume of his masterwork was going to press, Bertrand Rus…
998. Gregor Mendel founded genetics after twice failing his teaching examAn Augustinian friar in Brno grew some 28,000 plants, mostly peas, and found that hidden traits return in predictable ratios. He presented the results to about forty listeners in …
999. British customs destroyed Marconi's first radio gear, fearing it was a bombIn early 1896 a 21-year-old Guglielmo Marconi landed at Dover with a case of strange apparatus. Amid British fears of Italian anarchists, officials suspected a bomb and had his eq…
1000. Gustav Kirchhoff read the Sun's ingredients from its lightIn 1859 Gustav Kirchhoff showed that the Sun contains sodium, without leaving his laboratory in Heidelberg. By passing light through a spectroscope, he and the chemist Robert Buns…
1001. G. H. Hardy boasted his mathematics was useless; physics and cryptography disagreeHardy, the Cambridge purist who discovered Ramanujan, took pride in never having done anything useful. Yet his formula with Ramanujan for counting integer partitions helps physici…
1002. Ohm's law was so coldly received that Ohm quit his teaching jobToday every electronics student learns that current rises in step with voltage. When a Cologne schoolteacher named Georg Ohm published that relationship in 1827, his own college w…
1003. Gaspard Monge solved a week-long fortress problem with drawings in two daysMilitary engineers at Mézières expected a fortification calculation to take a week. Gaspard Monge, a merchant's son barred from the officer school because he was not noble, handed…
1004. Georg Cantor proved some infinities are bigger, and paid a heavy priceGeorg Cantor showed there are more real numbers than counting numbers, which means infinity comes in different sizes, endlessly. Leopold Kronecker called him a scientific charlata…
1005. A shoemaker's self-taught son wrote the logic every computer now runsGeorge Boole left formal schooling early, taught himself languages and calculus, and was supporting his family by sixteen. In 1847 he turned logic into algebra built on true and f…
1006. George Eastman made photography a push of a button for everyoneBefore 1888, taking a photograph meant handling chemicals yourself. George Eastman, a former bank clerk, sold a roll-film camera and promised customers that if they pressed the bu…
1007. Georges Cuvier proved species go extinct, yet rejected evolution entirelyIn the 1790s many naturalists doubted that any species had ever vanished completely. Georges Cuvier compared fossil bones with living animals and settled the argument, naming the …
1008. A Danish botanist wrote the first plant ecology textbook, then got plagiarisedIn 1895 Eugen Warming published Plantesamfund, often called the first textbook of plant ecology, and asked a new question: why do unrelated plants in distant places solve drought,…
1009. Fibonacci's real legacy was teaching Europe to count with Arabic numeralsThe rabbit sequence made his name famous, but Fibonacci's bigger gift was practical. His 1202 Book of Calculation showed European merchants how Hindu-Arabic digits, with zero and …
1010. The Lady with the Lamp was also a pioneering data visualiserFlorence Nightingale is remembered walking hospital wards at night, but her sharpest weapon may have been a chart. She popularised the polar area diagram, a circular graph still u…
1011. Before DNA, Francis Crick designed naval mines and measured boring waterThe man who helped crack DNA's double helix spent World War II designing magnetic and acoustic mines for the Admiralty. His abandoned doctoral project, on the viscosity of hot wat…
1012. Frederick Sanger won the chemistry Nobel twice, first for proteins then DNAOnly three people have won two Nobel Prizes in the same category, and Frederick Sanger is one. First he proved proteins have exact, definite sequences by decoding insulin. Then he…
1013. Friedrich Wöhler made urea from minerals and rattled belief in a life forceIn 1828 chemists widely believed organic compounds required a vital force found only in living things. Friedrich Wöhler then made urea, a substance from urine, out of inorganic in…
1014. Fritz Haber's ammonia feeds billions, and his gas weapons haunt historyFood grown with ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process is estimated to sustain nearly half the world's population. The same chemist also pioneered chlorine as a weapon in World War …
1015. Galen's anatomy, drawn largely from apes, ruled Western medicine for centuriesFor more than 1,300 years, Western doctors learned the body largely through one physician from Pergamon. Galen worked when human dissection was banned across the Roman Empire, so …
1016. Galileo turned a Dutch spyglass idea into a tool that reshaped the heavensA lutenist's son who dropped medicine for mathematics, Galileo heard of a Dutch spyglass in 1608 and within a year had built his own. Pointing it upward, he saw mountains on the M…
1017. The cyclotron began as a library doodle and a junkyard magnetOne evening in 1929 Ernest Lawrence flipped through a journal in the Berkeley library and saw a diagram of a straight-line particle accelerator. He imagined curling it into a spir…
1018. A flax miller's son from New Zealand found the atomic nucleusErnest Rutherford, fourth of twelve children on New Zealand farmland, became the father of nuclear physics. He showed that an atom's charge sits in a tiny core, performed the firs…
1019. Ernst Haeckel coined ecology, drew exquisite sea creatures, and got embryos wrongErnst Haeckel named thousands of species, gave biology words like ecology and phylum, and produced illustrations of sea life so beautiful they helped inspire Art Nouveau. He also …
1020. The man behind the Mach number refused to believe atoms existedErnst Mach photographed shock waves from supersonic bullets, and anyone who quotes a speed as Mach 2 is using his name. He also shaped Einstein's thinking about space and inertia.…

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