Category: Impactful Scientists

Joseph Priestley

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Joseph Priestley portrait
Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804) is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen, which helped to overthrow the phlogiston theory that attempted to explain oxidation processes.

Priestly was born in Bristal Fieldhead, England into a family with a strong religious influence.  Throughout his life he had no formal scientific training but his interest in science was aroused when he met Benjamin Franklin in London in 1766 and had discussions with him about electricity.  He took to the subject quickly and the next year published a 700 page work, The History and Present State of Electricity, which went through five successful editions.

The work for which Priestley is most famous for was done in 1774.  He would use a lens to focus sun rays to heat various chemicals and observe what gases they would emit.  When he focused the sun rays on mercuric oxide he was able to capture the gas emitted.  He tested this new gas on mice and noticed they would live much longer entrapped with this gas than with an equal amount of air.  The gas was not soluble in water and candles burned much longer in it too.  He had discovered oxygen.  This work combined with that of Antoine Lavoisier’s further experiments helped to overthrow the theory of phlogiston.

Although Priestly was raised as a devoted Calvinist he came to reject those beliefs and increasing came to hold unpopular religious beliefs.  In the last decade of his life he fled England to the United States where he lived his final days in a more tolerant religious environment.

Joseph John Thomson

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Joseph John Thomson (1856 – 1940) was an English Nobel Laureate who made key contributions to the field of physics.  Most notably he is credited with discovering the electron.

The Life of J. J. Thomson

Joseph John Thomson
J. J. Thomson

J.J. Thomson was born in Cheetham Hill near Manchester in England.  His father planned for him to be an engineer, but when an apprenticeship couldn’t be found he was sent to Owens College at the young age of fourteen.  There he obtained a small scholarship to attend Trinity College, Cambridge where he obtained his Fellowship, received his Master of Arts degree, culminating in the Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge.

While at the University of Cambridge, Thomson did important research to advance our understanding of the atom.  Most important he was one of the first to suggest that the atom may be composed smaller, more fundamental units.  He carried out research with cathode rays, which are beams of light the follow from electrical discharge in a vacuum tube, that led to the discovery of the electron.  From his experiments, he was able to at which these rays were deflected by a magnetic field and to calculate the ration of the electrical charge to the mass of the particles.  What he discovered was that this ratio was always to same no matter what gases were used, and thus he determined that the particles making up the various elemental gases must be the same.

Along with discovering the electron Thomson was the first to determine that each hydrogen atom has only one electron.  He was pivotal in inventing the mass spectrometer which assisted in chemical analyses.  Thomson received various awards for his scientific achievements throughout his life including a Nobel Prize in physics in 1906.  He was knighted in 1908.  JJ Thomson died in 1940 at the age of 83 and was buried in Westminster Abbey with many other scientific greats.

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John Dalton

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John Dalton portrait
John Dalton

John Dalton (1766 – 1844) was an Englishman born into a relatively poor Quaker family but due to his high intelligence and persistent curiosity he grew to make many important contributions to science in meteorology, chemistry, and physics.  He is remembered most for integrating atomic theory with chemistry.

Dalton embodied the Quaker way of life, living a humble life, never marring and never having any children.  He was content with teaching, lecturing, and doing his research.  In 1794 he wrote his first scientific paper on color blindness, concluding that color blindness was hereditary.  Both he and his brother were color-blind.  Although the specifics of his theory turned out to be incorrect, color blindness was termed Daltonism as a result of his work.

In the early 1800s Dalton formulated his atomic theory, although how he developed his ideas are not fully known.  But he did have a lifelong interest in meteorology and recorded over 200,000 observations in his diary.  He realized that evaporated water was independent or air, that they were each made of discrete particles, and that they mixed and occupied the same space.  Through that he conducted various other experiments on the other known elements of the time – hydrogen, carbon, sulfur, and more – in an attempt to  determine their relative sizes and weights.  He was thus able to formulate a complete atomic theory, although naturally some of his ideas turned out to be incorrect.

Dalton’s atomic theory states that elements are made of vanishingly small, fundamental particles called atoms.  These particles contain the same properties for each element but are different for different elements.  Chemical reactions occur when atoms from different elements are combined or separated.

In 1822 the Royal Society elected him as a member; eleven years later the French Academy of Sciences elected his as a foreign member.  Eleven years after that, in 1844 Dalton died of paralysis.  His ideas lived on laying the framework of atomic theory for future scientists to improve upon and thrust the atomic idea to the forefront of the physical sciences.

James Watt

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James Watt (1736 – 1819) vastly improved the Newcomen engine with a new steam engine of his own in 1781.  Watt’s improvements on the Newcomen’s engine provide one of the first significant examples of the application of cutting edge scientific research towards a technology that benefits society.

James Watt portrait
James Watt

Watt was born in Scotland, was the son of a shipwright, ship owner, and merchant and he never attended university because he was intended to take over the family shipping business when he grew older.  However when the family shipping business failed Watt traveled to London to learn instrument repair and returned to Scotland a year later where he eventually ended up working at Glasglow University as an instrument maker.   It was here that Watt began to experiment with steam power, and in 1763 Watt asked to repair a Newcomen engine from the university.

While fixing the Newcomen engine, which had been in use and remained largely unchanged in its design for over half a century, Watt noticed the huge inefficiency required to fully heat and then fully cool the entire massive cylinder at every stroke of the piston.  His insight was to create two chambers – one which was kept hot all of the time and one which was kept cool all of the time – that was connected by a valve that allowed steam to flow from the hot to the cool cylinder, where once it condensed would create the vacuum required to create the atmospheric pressure necessary to power the engine.  This change dramatically improved the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the steam engine.  He also added subsequent improvements to his engine based on further experiments such as his double acting engine, which was a true steam engine as opposed to an atmospheric engine.

In 1769 Watt was able to patent his engine designs and he went on to have a successful commercial partnership with Matthew Boulton, an English manufacturer.   The Boulton & Watt steam engines were state of the art at the time and helped to advance the Industrial Revolution through their usage in factories and mills.  His legacy as a scientist and inventor is immortalized in the SI unit of power, the watt, being named after him.

Nicolaus Copernicus

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Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) can be equated with the person who’s work began the Scientific Revolution in Europe in the sixteenth century.  Although people think of Copernicus as a scientist he was really more of an intermediary between the ancient philosophers and modern scientists.  He did not carry out experiments or make any meaningful observations of the heavens.  Instead he had an idea for a model of the universe that he believed was better than any previous idea, and it happened to turn out to be correct.

Copernicus was born in Torun, a Polish town, and was the son of a wealthy merchant.  He eventually moved to Italy where he studied in universities there and was influenced by the humanist movement occurring at the time.  It was there he read a book by a German mathematician known as Regiomontanus called Epitome of the Almagest, where inconsistencies of the Ptolemaic model were pointed out.  This created doubt in Copernicus’ mind about the accuracy of Earth centered Ptolemaic model of the universe and he began to formulate an outline of a heliocentric model when he had mostly complete by 1510.

Copernicus’ model was much simpler than the Ptolemaic model in that it eliminated the need for the many cumbersome equants, epicycles, and deferrents needed to make the model work.  Despite its elegance, Copernicus delayed in publishing his work until the year that he died in 1543 when he published On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres.  His delay in publishing was probably due to fear of criticism.  While it did provide a workable model of the universe it also raised many questions (both theological and physical) that Copernicus would have had no way of answering.  It was because of these questions that the Copernican model took almost a century to become widely accepted when the invention of the telescope proved inconclusively that his model was correct.

Carl Linnaeus

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Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) is famous for his work on species classification and his system for classification based on ranking and naming species is still in wide use today.  Linnaeus is often regarded as the father of modern taxonomy.

Early Life

Carl Linnaeus portrait
Carl Linnaeus

Linnaeus was born in Rashult, a town in southern Sweden. He was the oldest of five children and his father, Nils Linnaeus, was an avid gardener. This seems to help explain why it seems that from a very early age Linnaeus developed an affection for nature, in particular plants.  As a boy he would spend hours in his fathers garden exploring the growing plants. He education began at home, both in the garden and from his father who taught him the basics of reading and writing.

Carl’s father sensed his passion for botany and convinced a local doctor and botanist, Johan Rothman, to tutor him in medicine and botany. In 1727, at the age of 21, he enrolled to study at Lund University and the following year he transferred to Uppsala University, the most prestigious school in Sweden. There he was able to study both medicine and botany before embarking on a few expeditions around Sweden where he created and then refined his species classification system.

Scientific Career

The cornerstone of Linnaeus’s scientific career was the development of a hierarchical system of classification for all living organisms. In 1735 Linnaeus published one of his most famous works, Systema Naturae, which by the tenth edition can be considered the beginning of zoological nomenclature as it’s the first edition to use binomial nomenclature throughout.  By this time the work had grown from a twelve page manuscript to once classifying over 4,400 plant species and 7,700 animal species.

Along with his scientific work in taxonomy Linnaeus tried to apply science to bureaucratic practices with the goal of mobilizing resources to the improvement of the population and the strengthening of the state.  He was a founder of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.  By the time of his death he was one of the most influential scientists of his time thanks to his enormous capacity for work and high ambition.

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Edmond Halley

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Edmond Halley

Edmond Halley (1656 – 1742) was a prominent astronomer and mathematician who is best known today as the calculator of the orbit of Halley’s Comet. He made a lesser known but more significant contribution to science when he helped to arrange and the finance the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia. 

Like many scientists of his day Halley was born into a wealthy family, where he was able to obtain a private home tutor before he entered school.  He ending up enrolling in Queens College at Oxford where he came under the tutelage of John Flamsteed, The United Kingdom’s first Astronomer Royal.  Roughly 45 years later Halley would succeed Flamsteed to become the UK’s second Astronomer Royal.

Halley earned his scientific reputation early in life by cataloging and publishing a star catalog of the Southern Hemisphere, earning him election to the Royal Society at the age of 22.  His personal wealthy and reputation allowed him to travel often where he would make many observations a variety topics such as winds, comets, planets, and magnetism.

Christiaan Huygens

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Christiaan Huygens

Christiaan Huygens (1629 – 1695) played a primary role in the discovery into the nature of light, developed the tools of calculus, published the first book on probability theory, and invented the first pendulum clock.  These accomplishments and more made him an important figure in the early scientific revolution.

Huygens was born into a wealthy Dutch family, excelled early in mathematics which he studies later on in college.  His early work focused on mathematics but he quickly turned his attention to the telescope in hopes to better understand how they work.  He used improved telescopes to identify the rings of Saturn and discover its largest moon, Titan.

In 1666 Huygens became a founding member of the French Academy of Sciences, one of the oldest scientific organizations in the world.  However Huygens is best know by his work on the nature of light.  Through his observations and experiments with light he became a proponent of the wave theory of light which was rejected by Isaac Newton for his particle theory of light.  The wave nature of light was confirmed by a double slit experiment by Thomas Young in 1803 and today we accept that light acts both as a wave and a particle.

Isaac Newton

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Isaac Newton portrait
Isaac Newton

Born on Christmas Day in 1642, the world was gifted Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) who went on to become the greatest scientist of his era and one of the most influential persons of all time.  He made a number of revolutionary discoveries involving mass, inertia, motion, gravitation, and optics.  In the process of achieving some of those discoveries, he invented an entire new field of mathematics called calculus.  Indeed, to see further than Newton one would have to be standing on the shoulders of a giant.

Newton grew up in England in an nurturing family environment as his father died before his birth and his mother left him in the care of his grandmother shortly after.   This early childhood experience surly affected his emotional state in adulthood.  Newton attended Cambridge University in 1661 at the time that the Scientific Revolution was underway.  In 1665 an outbreak of plague forced the university to close forcing Newton to return home.  During the next 18 months Newton produced some of his scientific best works.

As prolific as Newton’s lifetime scientific achievements were, he squandered much of his time during the 1670s studying alchemy, the occult, and writing religious tracts.  Many of us think of Newton as the first of the modern scientists but as John Maynard Keynes perceptively noted he was more like the last of the magicians.  He became and increasingly isolated individual with an abrasive personality.  It was only with the encouragement and financial backing of his friend Edmond Halley that he published his most famous work Principia in 1687 which laid out his laws of motion and universal gravitation.

Newton’s scientific achievements awarded him an enormous amount of fame, influence, status, and wealth.  He was made a Fellow of Trinity College in 1667, elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1672, elected a Member of Parliment in 1689, became Warden of the Mint in 1696, Master of the Mint in 1698, elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, and Knighted by Queen Anne in 1705.

Rene Descartes

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Rene Descartes portrait
Rene Descartes

The French mathematician Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) insightfully connected the bridge between geometry and algebra by developing analytic, or what is now called Cartesian geometry.  Aside from his brilliant mathematical works he was extremely influential in other area’s of science and philosophy.

Descartes was born in France to a bourgeois family, educated at a Jesuits college, and joined the army at the age of 22 where he met a man named Isaac Beekman who kindled his interest in science and left an indelible stamp of influence on his early adulthood.   Descartes then moved to the Netherlands where formulated some of his most influential ideas.  While Descartes was working with curves he realized that the key to solving them was by using coordinates.  In 1637 in his appendix to his book Discourse on Methods titled La Geometrie, Descartes shows how a single equation can be used to explain every single point along a curve.   This work laid the foundation for the invention of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.

In addition to his mathematical contributions Descartes was also influential in philosophy and science.  He was one of the first to break away from the Aristotelian Scholastic mode of thought, which was extremely entrenched in intellectual institutions during his life.  He wrote speculations on a multitude of topics including the nature of the mind, mind-body dualism, God, the sensations and passions, and morality.