Famous Scientists Photographed at Work in Their Labs

Discoveries tend to be remembered as names and dates, but they happened in rooms full of glassware, wiring and stacks of notes. This gallery collects archive photographs of famous scientists at their benches, telescopes and desks, roughly in the order the pictures were taken, from Marie Curie at her measuring apparatus around 1900 to Vera Rubin at Kitt Peak in the 1970s. Each caption says what is in the frame and what the work was. The test for a place was simple: a real photograph of the scientist in the room or observatory where the research happened. Formal studio portraits are left out, and so are painted scenes, which is why Louis Pasteur, best known at work through Albert Edelfelt's 1885 portrait, does not appear. A few of these pictures were set up for the press, and the captions say so where the record does.