Items26The creator’s order
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Antonie van LeeuwenhoekBorn 24 Oct 1632Antonie 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.…0i - 2
William HerschelBorn 15 Nov 1738William 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,…0i - 3
Robert BunsenBorn 30 Mar 1811Robert 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,…0i - 4
Willem EinthovenBorn 21 May 1860Willem 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…0i - 5
Mikhail TsvetMikhail 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,…0i - 6
Hans GeigerBorn 30 Sept 1882Hans 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…0i - 7
C. T. R. WilsonBorn 14 Feb 1869C. 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…0i - 8
Francis William AstonBorn 1 Sept 1877Francis 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.…0i - 9
Hans BergerBorn 21 May 1873Hans 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…0i - 10
Ernest LawrenceBorn 8 Aug 1901Ernest 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…0i
