Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Humphry DavyHumphry DavyBorn 17 Dec 1778Humphry Davy used electricity to isolate potassium and sodium and designed the miner's safety lamp, but in the early 1800s he was also London's most fashionable lecturer: his chemistry demonstrations at the Royal Institution drew such crowds that Albemarle Street became one of the first one-way…0i
  2. 2Michael FaradayMichael FaradayBorn 22 Sept 1791Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and laid the foundations for electric motors and generators, and he also founded the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for young people in 1825, giving many of them himself. His 1860 series The Chemical History of a Candle, still in print,…0i
  3. 3Mary SomervilleMary SomervilleBorn 26 Dec 1780Mary Somerville, largely self-taught in mathematics, translated and expanded Laplace's celestial mechanics as The Mechanism of the Heavens (1831), then wrote On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), a bestselling synthesis of contemporary science. A review of it by William Whewell helped…0i
  4. 4Thomas Henry HuxleyThomas Henry HuxleyBorn 4 May 1825Thomas Henry Huxley was a leading comparative anatomist who became Darwin's most effective public defender. He gave lectures to working men in London, and his 1868 talk On a Piece of Chalk, explaining deep time from a lump of chalk in his pocket, is still a classic of science writing. He coined the…0i
  5. 5Jacob BronowskiJacob BronowskiBorn 18 Jan 1908Jacob Bronowski was a mathematician who worked on wartime operational research and studied the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, later turning to biology. His 1973 BBC series The Ascent of Man, a 13-part history of science as human culture, was largely unscripted to camera. The…0i
  6. 6Richard FeynmanRichard FeynmanBorn 11 May 1918Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel prize in physics for quantum electrodynamics and was a celebrated teacher: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, from his Caltech courses of the early 1960s, are still used worldwide. His most famous public moment came at the 1986 Challenger inquiry, when he dropped…0i
  7. 7Carl SaganCarl SaganBorn 9 Nov 1934Carl Sagan was a planetary scientist who helped explain Venus's extreme greenhouse effect and worked on NASA missions including Viking and Voyager, for which he curated the Golden Record. His 1980 television series Cosmos reached hundreds of millions of viewers, and his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot…0i
  8. 8Stephen Jay GouldStephen Jay GouldBorn 10 Sept 1941Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard palaeontologist, proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium with Niles Eldredge in 1972, and for nearly thirty years wrote a monthly essay for Natural History magazine, around 300 in all. Collections such as The Panda's Thumb and the book Wonderful Life, about the…0i
  9. 9Jane GoodallJane GoodallBorn 3 Apr 1934Jane Goodall began studying wild chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960 and soon observed them making and using tools, which forced scientists to rethink what made humans distinct. National Geographic films and her books such as In the Shadow of Man made her research world famous, and she spent…0i
  10. 10Stephen HawkingStephen HawkingBorn 8 Jan 1942Stephen Hawking showed in 1974 that black holes should emit radiation, one of the major results of modern theoretical physics, while living with motor neurone disease. A Brief History of Time (1988), written for general readers, sold millions of copies, though many buyers admitted not finishing it.…0i