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Leonardo da Vinci
Born
Leonardo da Vinci left thousands of notebook pages, written in mirror script and mixing anatomy, water flow, flight and shopping lists. The Codex Arundel at the British Library and the Royal Collection's anatomical drawings are digitised. They show him returning to the same problem for years, sketching variants, noting what he still needed to test and leaving many questions unanswered.
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Galileo Galilei
Born
Galileo Galilei's working papers on motion, held at the National Central Library in Florence, record ball-rolling and projectile experiments with measured distances that historians such as Stillman Drake used to reconstruct how he reached the law of falling bodies. His January 1610 notes on the "stars" beside Jupiter show him changing his interpretation night by night until he concluded they were moons.
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Robert Boyle
Born
Robert Boyle's work diaries, kept at the Royal Society and published online in a scholarly edition by Birkbeck, University of London, record experiments, recipes, failed trials and reports from others. They show how much of his work relied on assistants such as Robert Hooke, who built his air pump, and on careful reporting so that others could repeat an experiment.
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Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton's student notebook, with its list of "Certain Philosophical Questions", and his waste book of mathematical work from the mid-1660s are digitised by Cambridge University Library, along with many of his alchemical and theological papers. They show a young man questioning his textbooks, calculating long series by hand and even pressing a bodkin behind his eye to test vision.
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Gilbert White
Born
Gilbert White, curate of Selborne in Hampshire, kept a daily Naturalist's Journal from 1768 until his death in 1793, recording weather, first swallows, flowering dates and the habits of earthworms. Held at the British Library and published in full, the journals show observation slowly turning into argument, and fed his letters to Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington that became The Natural History of Selborne.
More about Gilbert White6
Antoine Lavoisier
Born
Antoine Lavoisier's laboratory registers, held by the French Academy of Sciences, record weighings that show him slowly abandoning the phlogiston theory in the 1770s and arriving at the role of oxygen in burning. Many entries are in the hand of his wife and collaborator Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, who kept records, translated English chemistry and drew the apparatus for his textbook.
More about Antoine Lavoisier7
Humphry Davy
Born
Humphry Davy's notebooks, held mainly at the Royal Institution, mix experiments on laughing gas, electrochemistry and the miner's safety lamp with drafts of poetry. The Davy Notebooks Project, led by Lancaster University, transcribed them with help from volunteer members of the public. They show him testing gases on himself and moving freely between science and verse.
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Michael Faraday
Born
Michael Faraday numbered the paragraphs of his laboratory diary consecutively for decades, from 1820 to 1862, and the Royal Institution holds the originals; a printed edition appeared in the 1930s. The entry for 29 August 1831 describes the iron ring experiment that showed electromagnetic induction, and many others record attempts that did not work, with notes on what to try next.
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Charles Darwin
Born
Charles Darwin's transmutation notebooks of 1837 to 1839, held at Cambridge University Library and published in a scholarly edition and on Darwin Online, show the theory of natural selection forming over two years. Notebook B contains his branching tree sketch headed "I think", and later entries record his reading of Malthus. Two of the notebooks went missing from the library around 2000 and were anonymously returned in 2022.
More about Charles Darwin10
Alfred Russel Wallace
Born
Alfred Russel Wallace's field notebooks from the Malay Archipelago, kept from 1854 to 1862 and held mainly at the Natural History Museum and the Linnean Society, record specimens, local helpers and ideas about species. His assistant Ali, from Sarawak, collected alongside him for years. The notebooks have been digitised and his letters published by the Wallace Correspondence Project, showing the independent route by which he reached natural selection.
More about Alfred Russel Wallace11
Louis Pasteur
Born
Louis Pasteur asked his family to keep his laboratory notebooks private, and they stayed closed until given to the National Library of France in the 1960s and opened later. The historian Gerald Geison's 1995 study of them showed that Pasteur's public accounts of his anthrax and rabies vaccine trials left out how much he had borrowed from a rival's method and how few tests preceded the first human treatment.
More about Louis Pasteur12
Alexander Graham Bell
Born
Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory notebooks, digitised by the Library of Congress, include the entry for 10 March 1876 recording the first words transmitted to his assistant Thomas Watson. Earlier pages show sketches of the liquid transmitter that resembles one in Elisha Gray's patent caveat, which is why historians still debate who should be credited, and how much Watson's skill mattered.
More about Alexander Graham Bell13
Thomas Edison
Born
Thomas Edison's Menlo Park and West Orange laboratories produced millions of pages of notebooks, many signed and dated by assistants such as Charles Batchelor and Francis Upton for patent purposes. The Thomas A. Edison Papers project at Rutgers University has published and digitised them. They show the incandescent lamp emerging from thousands of filament tests carried out by a team, not one inventor.
More about Thomas Edison14
Marie Curie
Born
Marie and Pierre Curie's laboratory notebooks from 1897 to 1902, held at the National Library of France, are still radioactive, so readers must sign a waiver and wear protective clothing; digitised copies are available. The pages are in both their hands, showing how closely they shared the measurements that led to polonium and radium, and the painstaking work with tonnes of pitchblende residue.
More about Marie Curie15
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Born
Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with thousands of results, mostly without proofs, before and during his collaboration with G. H. Hardy at Cambridge. The "lost notebook" of his final year was found by George Andrews in the Trinity College library in 1976. Andrews and Bruce Berndt spent decades proving its claims in a multi-volume edition, showing how far his intuition ran ahead of proof.
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Albert Einstein
Born
Albert Einstein's Zurich notebook of 1912 to 1913, published with commentary in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and the scholarly study The Genesis of General Relativity, shows him writing down nearly the right field equations and then rejecting them for reasons he later realised were mistaken. His friend Marcel Grossmann's help with the mathematics appears on its pages. He returned to the correct form only in November 1915.
More about Albert Einstein17
Frederick Banting
Born
Frederick Banting's notebook entry of 31 October 1920, written late at night after reading a journal article, sets out in a few lines his idea for isolating the pancreatic secretion that became insulin. It is held at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, whose digitised insulin collection also contains the laboratory notebooks he kept with Charles Best, showing how many dogs and failed extracts the work involved.
More about Frederick Banting18
Alexander Fleming
Born
Alexander Fleming's laboratory notebooks, held at the British Library, include his notes from 1928 on a culture plate where a mould had killed surrounding bacteria. They show him testing the "mould juice" against many germs but struggling to purify it. The breakthrough to a usable drug came a decade later from Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, Norman Heatley and their team in Oxford.
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Rosalind Franklin
Born
Rosalind Franklin's laboratory notebooks, held at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, show how close she came on her own to the structure of DNA in early 1953, noting that the B form was helical with phosphate groups on the outside. Historians reading them alongside her correspondence have revised the story that she was simply beaten, showing a careful researcher working with her student Raymond Gosling.
More about Rosalind Franklin20
Richard Feynman
Born
Richard Feynman's notebooks and papers, held in the Caltech Archives, include his working pages on the diagrams that bear his name and on many problems he never published. When a historian called them a record of his thinking, he replied that they were the thinking itself, done on paper. They show him reworking calculations again and again from different starting points.
More about Richard Feynman21
Jane Goodall
Born
Jane Goodall's handwritten field notes from Gombe, begun in 1960, record the chimpanzee David Greybeard stripping a twig to fish for termites, the observation that challenged the idea that only humans made tools. The notes, later joined by those of Tanzanian field assistants who continued daily records, are digitised and studied through Duke University's Jane Goodall Institute Research Center. She died in October 2025.
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