Category: Impactful Scientists

Robert Boyle

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Robert Boyle portrait
Robert Boyle

The scientific contributions of Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691) cover  a variety of subjects including physics, hydrostatics, and the earth sciences, however he is best known for his contributions to the field of chemistry.  Through his efforts, his work helped to break away the scientific world from alchemy and to usher in modern chemistry.

Born in Ireland to a wealthy family, Boyle attended a private boarding school at the age of eight, followed by a tour of the European continent with his French tutor that ended in Italy at the time when the great Galileo died.  This experience had a profound impact on Boyle and when he returned to England where he hooked up with other like-minded individuals to form the “invisible college” where they met, often at Gresham College, and  was to be the precursor of the Royal Society of London.

At the same time Boyle hired Robert Hooke as his assistant.  The two like-minded men collaborated on many discoveries including Boyle’s Law, which states that pressure and volume of gas have an inverse relationship at a fixed temperature.

The publication of The Sceptical Chymist in 1661 which is considered by many as the beginning of modern chemistry.  The book is composed as a dialogue and in it he rejects the ideas of Aristotelian elements of earth, fire, wind, and water and suggests the idea that matter consists of atoms in motion and that every phenomenon is the result of the collisions of these particles.

Antony Van Leeuvenhoek

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Antony Van Leeuvenhoek portrait
Antony Van Leeuvenhoek

Important advances in microbiology were made by Antony van Leeuvenhoek (1632 – 1723), which include a substantial improvement on the microscope followed by the discovery of a variety of single celled organisms.

Antony Van Leeuvenhoek was for his time an unusual candidate to make breakthrough scientific discoveries.  He earned no university degrees and therefore had no formal scientific training, and he was not particularly wealthy.  His trade was that of a textile merchant that led him to develop improved lens in order to better observe thread quality.  He cultivated in himself a tremendous skill in lens making with some of his lens being able to magnify up to 300 times and possibly higher, which was a significantly higher level of magnification than the compound microscopes of his day that only magnified around 20x – 30x.  During his lifetime he may have made over 500 magnifying lenses.

He used these lenses, along with his terrific eyesight and observational skills, to observe the first bacteria.  Through a friend he communicated with the Royal Society through dozens of informal letters, and although the Society was originally skeptical of his claims they were later verified by Robert Hooke and others. This led to his election into the Royal Society in 1680 and bestowed on him a tremendous amount of fame.

Robert Hooke

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Robert Hooke portrait
Robert Hooke

Seventeenth century England underwent sweeping changes in all aspects of human civilization and Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703) helped to provide a catalyst in ushering humanity into the modern scientific era.  Among his greatest accomplishments include discovering the building blocks of life and coining the word cell; discovering, along with Robert Boyle, many important aspects of air; being one of the first to observe fossils and provide a reasonably accurate description of how fossils form; and discovering laws of elasticity for which Hooke’s Law is named after him.

Robert Hooke live through a period of remarkable change in England which included the English Civil War which resulted in the trial and execution of Charles I, the Protectorate under Cromwell followed by the restoration of the monarchy, the Great Fire of London, and the Glorious Revolution.  With all this social and political upheaval it opened the way for new modes of thoughts and institutions.  One important new institution to the progress of science was the Royal Society of London, founded in 1660, of which Hooke has early involvement with and becomes an elected Fellow in 1663.

drawing of an ant from Micrographia by Robert Hooke

It was shortly after that time, in 1665, where Hooke released the first major publication by the Royal Society, a book titled Micrographia.  In it he revealed his observations as seen through the microscope while littering the pages with illustrations of the microscopic world.  His work proceeded to spark a huge interest in microscopy. 

Along with his scientific achievements Hook played a key role in rebuilding London after the fire in 1666.  His architectural designs earned him significantly more wealth than he earned as a scientist allowing him to die a wealthy man dispute him coming from a modest background.

William Harvey

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William Harvey portrait
William Harvey

The English physician William Harvey (1578 – 1657) earns the accolade of being the first person to describe the circulatory system, largely laid out in his 1628 book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood.  Harvey made his discoveries by largely ignoring the medical texts of his time, notable those of Galen, and instead by performing experiments and making dissections on animals.  Sadly, animals were probably harmed in the making of his discoveries.

Like most prominent scientists of his time, Harvey was born into a wealthy family and attended university at Padua in Italy.  Years later, he served as physician to King James I and Charles I, becoming a committed royalist in the process while building up a considerable medical practice.

Harvey lived in a period where most lives were still governed by superstition and witchcraft was still feared.  Being a learned man with an extensive medical background he was skeptical of these claims, as most learned people are and should be.   He and ended up examining several accused witches and played a key role in the acquittal all of the accused witches he examined.

John Napier

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John Napier portrait
John Napier

John Napier (1550 – 1617) was a Scottish mathematician best known for his formulation of logarithms which provided aid to mathematical calculations.  In 1614 he published he book titled A Description of the Wonderful Law of Logarithms, which explained the technique of devising the logarithm (and differs from today’s concept of having a base raised to a corresponding exponent) and provided copious tables of logarithms to make calculations easier.  Additionally, Napier was the first to popularize the decimal point as a means to separate the fraction from the integer.

The logarithm is simply the inverse operation the the exponential, in other words a logarithm can be used to undo what an exponent does.  Logarithms were particularly useful in long distance navigation and astronomy whose calculations involved trigonometric functions.

In addition to publishing his impressive tables of logarithmic calculations Napier also found other ways to make mathematical calculations easier.  He invented what is called the Napier bones, a manually-operated calculating devise used to calculate products and quotients.

Galileo Galilei

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Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) was famously placed on house arrest by the Catholic church inquisition for his astronomical discoveries that disagreed with the accepted church dogma of the time.  It would prove to be a defining moment in scientific history as the old superstitious religious cosmology was being overthrown and humanity was thrust into the modern scientific era.

Portrait of Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei

Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.  – Galileo Galilei

Ironically as a boy Galileo was tempted by the monastic lifestyle but was persuaded by his father to study medicine at the University of Pisa, where he later became a professor of mathematics.  Throughout his life he experimented with the physics of objects and devoted himself to the study of astronomy, all the while making revolutionary discoveries.  He demonstrated experimentally that objects of any mass will all fall to the ground (or accelerate) at the same rate and that projectile objects fly through the air in a parabola.  He experimented with pendulums and showed that the time of the swing is always the same regardless of the length of the arc, which turned out to be due to the conservation of kinetic energy in the pendulum.

His most important discoveries turned out to be astronomical.  After improving the magnification by about 10 fold on a spyglass originally made by Dutch lensmaker Hans Lippershey, Galileo turned his attention to the sky and made his revolutionary discoveries.  He saw sunspots on the sun, craters and valleys on the moon, noticed four moons revolving around Jupiter, observed additional stars in the night sky, and observed the phases of Venus from which he deduced that the planet revolved around the Sun.  These discoveries and observations forever changed our view of astronomy and ushered in a the modern scientific age of astronomy.

Johannes Kepler

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Johannes Kepler portrait
Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was the man who once and for all upended the ancient dogma which held that the planets moved in perfect spheres and, with the assistance of Tycho Brahe’s detailed and precise astronomical observations, proved that the planets orbit in ellipses, with the Sun as one of the foci.

Kepler was born in the Holy Roman Empire (now Germany), was schooled in Latin in various subjects but stood out in mathematics.  At the age of 23 he became a lecturer in mathematics and astronomy in a Protestant school.  Like many of his contemporaries, Kepler had interests in both astronomy and astrology, both of which were reflected in his works.  For the early part of his life and career, Kepler believed that God had arranged the plants orbits into particular geometric schemes.  Originally he thought in two dimensions, with three sided (triangle), four sided (square), five sided (pentagon), six sided (hexagon), and seven sided (heptagon) all perfectly inscribed in a circle, each nested inside each other with the outermost figure being the triangle.  After observation failed to match the model Kepler then though in three dimensional figures using the platonic solids for the model of the solar system.  This model was elegant, perfect, and completely wrong.

Kepler's platonic solid

In 1600 Kepler became an assistant to Tycho Brahe but was not able to get his hands on Brahe’s observational data until after Brahe died.  When he eventually received access to the data he was able to finally deduce the ellipse as the correct orbit of the planets and formulate the three laws of planetary motion that bear his name.   These laws proved crucial to Isaac Newton’s discovery of his laws of gravitation.  Kepler also produced lesser know work in optics, discovering in 1604 an inverse square law of light intensity.   After Brahe’s death he was the court astronomer for Emperor Rudolf II, where his primary responsibility was making astrological predictions.  There was little distinction between astronomy and astrology at the time.  In memory of the emperor he named his great star catalogue the Rudolphine Tables, which he began with Brahe in 1600 and completed in 1627.

Tycho Brahe

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Tycho Brahe portrait
Tycho Brahe

During the 16th century, as the Copernican model of the universe became increasingly accepted, astronomers focused their attention on producing more precise measurements of the stars and planets.  The greatest observer of this per-telescopic era was Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601), born to a Danish noble family, where he rejected a career in politics and instead dedicated his life to astronomy after witnessing a solar eclipse in 1560 that hooked his attention to the sky.

Brahe is best known for his meticulous astronomical observations that he recorded in his observatory granted to him by King Frederick II, on the island of Hven (now called Ven) near Copenhagen.  The observatory had some of the finest instruments of the time, its own printing press, was a frequent destination of visiting scholars, and became a training station of a generation of young astronomers.

The completeness and accuracy of his observations cemented his legacy as one of the greatest astronomers of his era.  The breadth of data compiled in the observatory is no small feat – he accurately plotted the position of nearly 800 stars all without the assistance of a telescope.  Famously, the observational data compiled at the observatory assisted Johannes Kepler in calculating the elliptical orbits of the planets.

Francis Bacon

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“Knowledge itself is power.” – Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon portrait
Francis Bacon

If there is one person who could be credited with establishing the principles of science and ushering in the era of the Scientific Revolution it would be Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626).  Bacon argued for a new way of learning and collecting knowledge, one of forming observations, formulating hypothesis to explain the observations, then testing the hypothesis by rigorous experimentation.

Francis Bacon was born in London in the winter of 1561, home-schooled in his early youth and entered Trinity College at the age of 12.  Although he excelled in the traditional medieval curriculum, he came to the conclusion that the methods were flawed.  The medieval curriculum was dominated by the thinking of Aristotle.  Bacon was impressed by Aristotle’s intellect but he believed that his methods stood in the way of scientific progress.

After his schooling he spent much of his life working in the British government before publishing his great philosophical work, Novum Organum (New Instrument), where he laid out his method of inductive reasoning and the scientific method.  Bacon believed that the new body of scientific knowledge should be based on experimentation and observation and not on philosophical arguments or logic.

As an ambitious man Bacon had a very successful career in British politics and he rose to great heights within the government.  His career saw steady progression, highlighted by being knighted by King James I in 1603 and culminating with the position of Lord Chancellor in 1618.  Sadly his career ended in disgrace when he was charged with bribery and corruption charges in 1621.  He was fined and sentenced to some time in prison, ending his political career.  He spent his remaining days studying and writing before he died on pneumonia in 1626.

Bacon had an enormous impact on a generation of scientists, most notably in Robert Boyle.   He was also an influential proponent in the concept of establishing scientific organizations, where information could be shared and ideas debated.  It was in the Baconian spirit that the British Royal Society was formed in November 1660, with Boyle being one of its founding members.  It is the oldest scientific society in existence today.

Andreas Vesalius

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Andreas Vesalius portrait
Andreas Vesalius

Referred to by many as the founder of modern anatomy, Vesalius (1514 – 1564) was born in Brussels, studied medicine in Paris, and finally settled in Italy as the Chair of Surgery and Anatomy at the University of Padua, which he earned the first day of receiving his medical doctorate from the University.  He published his famous works on human anatomy, On the Fabric of the Human Body,  a collection of seven books presenting a modern anatomical view of the complete human body, rife with many detailed drawings of the human body.

Vesalius was so influential because he was able to correct the errors of earlier anatomists due to his direct observation of the body through the dissection of executed criminals.  The detailed illustrations were drawn by artists present at the dissections and provided a valuable resource for medical students to reference.  The improved printing technology of the Renaissance helped preserve and distribute these drawings.

Later in life, Vesalius joined Charles V court as a doctor, leaving his post in Padua.  After serving a little more than a decade in the imperial court Vesalius embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where on his return he was shipwrecked on an island and soon died.  He was 50 years old at the time of his death but his influence on anatomy would be permanent.