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Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Born
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Delft cloth merchant, ground tiny single lenses and built hundreds of simple microscopes from the 1670s, some magnifying around 270 times. With them he became the first to describe bacteria, protozoa and sperm cells, reporting his findings in letters to the Royal Society. His instruments opened microbiology, though he kept his best lens-making methods secret.
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William Herschel
Born
William Herschel, a musician turned astronomer, ground and polished his own metal mirrors to build the most powerful reflecting telescopes of his day, finding Uranus in 1781 and cataloguing thousands of nebulae. His sister Caroline Herschel worked alongside him on the grinding and the observations, and discovered comets of her own. Telescope building was the family's work, not a sideline.
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Robert Bunsen
Born
Robert Bunsen refined the clean, hot gas burner that bears his name with his technician Peter Desaga, and around 1859 he and the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff built the spectroscope to read the coloured lines each element gives off when heated. The method found the new elements caesium and rubidium, and the same principle lets astronomers work out what stars are made of.
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Willem Einthoven
Born
Willem Einthoven built the string galvanometer in the early 1900s, a fine silver-coated quartz thread in a magnetic field sensitive enough to record the heart's tiny electrical signals. His machine weighed about 270 kilograms and needed five people to operate, but it gave medicine the electrocardiogram and the P, Q, R, S and T labels still used. He received the Nobel prize in 1924.
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Mikhail Tsvet
Mikhail Tsvet, a botanist studying plant pigments, poured leaf extracts through glass columns packed with chalk powder in the early 1900s and watched them separate into coloured bands. He called the method chromatography, from the Greek for colour writing. It was largely ignored until the 1930s, but chromatography in its many forms is now a standard way to separate and identify substances in almost every laboratory.
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Hans Geiger
Born
Hans Geiger built his first particle counter with Ernest Rutherford in Manchester in 1908, and in 1928 he and his student Walther Müller made it far more sensitive and practical. The Geiger-Müller tube clicks for each burst of ionising radiation that passes through it. It made radiation measurable almost anywhere, from physics laboratories to mines, hospitals and nuclear sites.
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C. T. R. Wilson
Born
C. T. R. Wilson set out to recreate the clouds he had seen on Ben Nevis and ended up building the cloud chamber, which by 1911 could show the trails of charged particles as lines of droplets. For decades it was the main way physicists saw subatomic particles, and it revealed the positron and the muon. He shared the 1927 Nobel prize in physics.
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Francis William Aston
Born
Francis William Aston, working at the Cavendish Laboratory after assisting J. J. Thomson, built the mass spectrograph in 1919, which sorts atoms by mass using electric and magnetic fields. With it he found isotopes in a large number of non-radioactive elements and measured their masses precisely. Mass spectrometry, its descendant, now identifies molecules in drug testing, forensics and space missions.
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Hans Berger
Born
Hans Berger, a psychiatrist in Jena, recorded the first human electroencephalogram in 1924 by placing electrodes on the scalp and amplifying the brain's faint electrical rhythms. He published in 1929 and was met with scepticism until Edgar Adrian and Bryan Matthews in Cambridge confirmed his findings in 1934. The EEG became central to diagnosing epilepsy and to sleep and brain research.
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Ernest Lawrence
Born
Ernest Lawrence conceived the cyclotron in 1929, which whirls charged particles in a spiral between magnets to reach high energies, and built the first working models at Berkeley from 1931 with his student M. Stanley Livingston. Cyclotrons produced new isotopes for medicine and research, and his laboratory pioneered the big team science of later particle physics. He won the Nobel prize in physics in 1939.
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Ernst Ruska
Born
Ernst Ruska, as a student in Berlin with his supervisor Max Knoll, built the first electron microscope in 1931, focusing beams of electrons with magnetic lenses instead of light with glass. By 1933 his instrument beat the resolution of the best light microscopes, and he went on to develop commercial models with Siemens. Electron microscopy revealed viruses and cell structures; he received the Nobel prize in physics in 1986.
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Arnold Beckman
Born
Arnold Beckman, a Caltech chemist, built the first practical pH meter in 1934 after a friend in the citrus industry asked for a reliable way to measure the acidity of lemon juice. His company went on to make the DU spectrophotometer, which made fast, accurate chemical analysis routine in laboratories. He lived to 104 and gave much of his fortune to science.
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Grote Reber
Born
Grote Reber, a radio engineer and amateur, built a nine-metre dish in his back garden in Wheaton, Illinois, in 1937 after reading of Karl Jansky's discovery of radio waves from space. For years he was effectively the world's only radio astronomer, producing the first radio map of the sky. His home-made dish is the ancestor of every radio telescope since.
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Archer Martin
Born
Archer Martin and Richard Synge developed partition chromatography at Leeds in 1941, a cheap, quick way to separate amino acids that made protein chemistry practical, and later paper chromatography. In 1952 Martin and Anthony James introduced gas chromatography, now used everywhere from oil refining to drug testing. Martin and Synge shared the 1952 Nobel prize in chemistry.
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Willard Libby
Born
Willard Libby and his team at the University of Chicago, including James Arnold and Ernest Anderson, developed radiocarbon dating in the late 1940s, measuring the decay of carbon-14 in once-living material. They tested it on objects of known age, such as Egyptian tomb wood. The method transformed archaeology and geology, and Libby received the 1960 Nobel prize in chemistry.
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Bernard Lovell
Born
Bernard Lovell drove the building of the great steerable radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, completed in 1957 with the engineer Charles Husband, despite cost overruns that nearly ruined him. Within weeks it was tracking the rocket that launched Sputnik, and it went on to study meteors, quasars and pulsars. Now the Lovell Telescope, it is still in use.
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Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
Born
Rosalyn Yalow and her long-time partner Solomon Berson developed radioimmunoassay in the 1950s at the Bronx veterans' hospital, using radioactive tracers and antibodies to measure tiny amounts of hormones such as insulin in blood. They refused to patent it. It transformed endocrinology and blood screening; Yalow received the 1977 Nobel prize, after Berson's death made him ineligible.
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Theodore Maiman
Born
Theodore Maiman built the first working laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in May 1960, using a small synthetic ruby crystal lit by a coiled flash lamp, after others had argued ruby could not work. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow had published the theory. Lasers now underpin spectroscopy, eye surgery, fibre-optic communication and the measurement of gravitational waves.
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Osamu Shimomura
Born
Osamu Shimomura isolated green fluorescent protein from the jellyfish Aequorea victoria in 1962, processing thousands of jellyfish caught off Friday Harbor in Washington State. Decades later Martin Chalfie showed it could be made to glow inside other organisms, and Roger Tsien engineered new colours. GFP became a way to watch genes and proteins at work in living cells; the three shared the 2008 Nobel prize in chemistry.
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Godfrey Hounsfield
Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer at EMI with no university degree, built the first computed tomography scanner, which scanned its first patient in 1971 at Atkinson Morley's Hospital in London with the radiologist James Ambrose. By combining many X-ray views by computer it showed slices through the body. He shared the 1979 Nobel prize with Allan Cormack, who had worked out the mathematics independently.
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Peter Mansfield
Born
Peter Mansfield, at the University of Nottingham, developed in the 1970s the mathematics and the echo-planar technique that turned nuclear magnetic resonance into fast, practical medical imaging. Paul Lauterbur in New York had shown how magnetic field gradients could make images. Their work led to the MRI scanner, and both shared the 2003 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
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Frederick Sanger
Born
Frederick Sanger at Cambridge first worked out how to read the order of amino acids in a protein, insulin, and then in 1977 published the chain-termination method for reading DNA, with colleagues including Alan Coulson. Sanger sequencing was the workhorse of genetics for three decades and carried the Human Genome Project. He is one of very few people to win two Nobel prizes in chemistry.
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Gerd Binnig
Born
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, with the technician Christoph Gerber, built the scanning tunnelling microscope at IBM in Zurich in 1981, running a needle-sharp tip just above a surface and measuring the current that leaks across. It made individual atoms visible for the first time. Binnig then co-invented the atomic force microscope in 1986, and he and Rohrer shared that year's Nobel prize in physics.
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Kary Mullis
Born
Kary Mullis, a chemist at the biotechnology company Cetus, conceived the polymerase chain reaction in 1983, a way of copying a stretch of DNA millions of times by repeated heating and cooling. Colleagues at Cetus, including Randall Saiki and Henry Erlich, did much of the work that made it reliable, helped by a heat-resistant enzyme from hot-spring bacteria. PCR is now used in diagnosis, forensics and almost all molecular biology.
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