50 Fun Facts About History of Science

Which Hollywood star of the 1940s co-invented a frequency-hopping radio system to guide Allied torpedoes?

Hedy Lamarr shared the patent with composer George Antheil. The same spread-spectrum principles are used today in Bluetooth and early versions of Wi-Fi.

Which element was detected in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse, decades before chemists isolated it on Earth?

Helium takes its name from helios, the Greek word for the Sun, where its yellow spectral line was first spotted. Chemists found it in a uranium ore in 1895.

Who coined the word radioactivity and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences?

Marie Curie won the Physics prize in 1903 and the Chemistry prize in 1911. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize at all.

Which theory of the universe's origin got its name from astronomer Fred Hoyle, who rejected it, on BBC radio?

The Big Bang was Hoyle's own phrase for an idea he argued against, preferring a steady-state universe. He later denied that he had meant the name as an insult.

Albert Einstein won his Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining which phenomenon, not for relativity?

The photoelectric effect earned Einstein the 1921 prize at a time when some physicists still doubted relativity. The award was handed over a year late, in 1922.

Which Scottish bacteriologist discovered penicillin after a holiday left mould growing on his culture plates?

Alexander Fleming came back to his laboratory in September 1928 and identified the stray mould as Penicillium. He shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.

Which English physicist set out three laws of motion in the Principia and later ran the Royal Mint?

Isaac Newton became Warden of the Mint in 1696 and Master in 1699, a post he held for the rest of his life. He reformed the coinage and pursued counterfeiters.

Which everyday word did William Whewell coin in 1833 for people then called natural philosophers?

Scientist first appeared in print in Whewell's 1834 review of a book by Mary Somerville. He also coined 'physicist' and suggested 'anode' and 'cathode' to Michael Faraday.

Which explosive did Alfred Nobel patent in 1867, building the fortune that still funds his prizes?

Dynamite made nitroglycerin safe to carry by soaking it into diatomaceous earth. Nobel invented it in 1866, a year before patenting it in England and Sweden.

Which Italian astronomer spent his last years under house arrest after a trial by the Inquisition?

Galileo Galilei had used his telescope to find four moons circling Jupiter, evidence that not everything orbits Earth. The Inquisition forced him to recant in 1633.

Which animal, born at Scotland's Roslin Institute, was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell?

The sheep, called Dolly, was named after singer Dolly Parton because the donor cell came from a mammary gland. Her preserved body is on show at the National Museum of Scotland.

Gregor Mendel worked out the basic laws of inheritance by growing which crop in a monastery garden?

Peas gave Mendel seven clear traits to follow, such as seed shape and flower colour. His results were overlooked until other botanists rediscovered them around 1900.

Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796 by giving a boy cowpox to protect him against which disease?

Smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. The word vaccine comes from the Latin name Jenner gave cowpox, meaning pustules of the cow.

Which Royal Navy ship carried Charles Darwin around the world on a survey lasting almost five years?

HMS Beagle was commanded by Robert FitzRoy, and Darwin had been told the voyage would last only two years. He spent much of it ashore studying geology and natural history.

Jane Goodall overturned the belief that only humans make tools by watching which animals in Tanzania?

Chimpanzees at Gombe stripped the leaves from twigs to make them into better tools, Goodall saw from 1960. She also found that they eat meat, when they had been thought vegetarian.

Which Austrian physicist imagined a cat in a sealed box, both alive and dead, to challenge quantum theory?

Erwin Schrödinger devised the thought experiment in 1935 while trading ideas with Albert Einstein. He meant it as a criticism of how Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg read quantum mechanics.

Which distant world did Clyde Tombaugh discover in 1930 on photographic plates at Lowell Observatory?

Pluto got its name from Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford who loved classical mythology. It was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

Which Greek mathematician of Syracuse is said to have run from his bath crying 'Eureka' over a crown puzzle?

Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier when Syracuse fell, despite orders that he should not be harmed. The bath story was told by the Roman writer Vitruvius.

Which Russian physiologist won a Nobel Prize for work on digestion before his dogs made him famous?

Ivan Pavlov won the 1904 Nobel Prize in medicine, becoming the first Russian laureate. The conditioning experiments grew out of that research on the digestive glands of dogs.

Which secret wartime programme, with a laboratory at Los Alamos, produced the first nuclear weapons?

The Manhattan Project took its name from the New York borough where its first headquarters stood. Its first device was detonated in the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945.

Which physicist predicted that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time?

Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and lived with it for more than 50 years. His book spent 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

Which Bletchley Park codebreaker proposed the 'imitation game' as a test of whether machines can think?

Alan Turing led Hut 8, the section that worked on German naval Enigma messages. His 1950 paper on thinking machines was written at the University of Manchester.

Which polished metal sphere, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, was Earth's first artificial satellite?

Sputnik 1 broadcast radio pulses for three weeks until its batteries ran down. Its launch set off the Sputnik crisis in America and started the Space Race.

Which particle was found at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012 after a 40-year search by physicists?

The Higgs boson earned Peter Higgs and François Englert the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting it decades earlier. The media nicknamed it the God particle after a 1993 book.

Which hormone did Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate in Toronto, transforming diabetes treatment?

Insulin was first isolated from dog pancreas in John Macleod's laboratory at the University of Toronto. Banting later shared half of his Nobel Prize money with Best.

Which Russian chemist left gaps in his periodic table and predicted three elements yet to be discovered?

Dmitri Mendeleev called the missing elements eka-aluminium, eka-boron and eka-silicon. They were later discovered as gallium, scandium and germanium.

Which chemist first used a rabies vaccine on a boy mauled by a dog and also disproved spontaneous generation?

Louis Pasteur gave nine-year-old Joseph Meister 13 inoculations over 11 days in July 1885. Three months later the boy was still in good health.

Jonas Salk chose not to patent or profit from the vaccine he announced in 1955 against which feared disease?

Polio had frightened so many families that Salk was hailed as a miracle worker when the vaccine's success was announced in April 1955. An oral vaccine by Albert Sabin came into use in 1961.

Which inventor backed direct current against George Westinghouse in the 1880s 'war of the currents'?

Thomas Edison's company claimed that high-voltage alternating current was hazardous, and it helped make sure the first electric chair was powered by a Westinghouse generator.

Which chemist led the London team behind Photo 51, the image that pointed to DNA's double helix?

Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, aged 37, four years before Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery. Her student Raymond Gosling took Photo 51 under her supervision in 1952.

Which daughter of the poet Byron wrote what is often called the first computer program, for Charles Babbage?

Ada Lovelace published a method for the Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. Her parents separated a month after she was born, and Byron died when she was eight.

Which Polish church canon published his Sun-centred model of the heavens just before his death in 1543?

Nicolaus Copernicus was also a physician, diplomat and economist with a doctorate in canon law. His book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, overturned the Earth-centred picture of the universe.

Wilhelm Röntgen won the first Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering which radiation, soon tested on his wife's hand?

X-rays got their name because Röntgen used the mathematical symbol for an unknown. He refused to patent the discovery so that society as a whole could benefit from it.

Physician John Snow traced an 1854 London outbreak of which disease to a public water pump on Broad Street?

Cholera cases clustered so closely around the pump that the parish authorities took off its handle. Snow later drew a dot map to show the pattern.

Zhang Heng's bronze device of AD 132 dropped balls from dragon heads into toads' mouths to signal which events?

Earthquakes as far as 500 km away could be registered, with the falling ball showing the direction of the tremor. Zhang presented this first seismoscope to the Han court.

Which chemist, who named oxygen, was guillotined in the French Revolution for his role in a tax-collecting firm?

Antoine Lavoisier had bought a share in the Ferme générale, the private company that collected royal taxes. Appeals to spare him for his contributions to chemistry failed.

Which German meteorologist proposed in 1912 that the continents drift, an idea geologists rejected until the 1960s?

Alfred Wegener was better known in his lifetime for polar research, and he died on the last of his four Greenland expeditions. Evidence such as palaeomagnetism later vindicated him.

Which German astronomer showed that planets move in ellipses and later saw his mother accused of witchcraft?

Johannes Kepler hit on the ellipse after about 40 failed attempts to fit the orbit of Mars. He published the result in his book Astronomia Nova.

Which marine biologist's book Silent Spring warned about pesticides and led to a nationwide American ban on DDT?

Rachel Carson faced fierce opposition from chemical companies when the book appeared in 1962. She had made her name with a trilogy of books about the sea.

Which Swedish astronomer's temperature scale first put water's boiling point at 0 and freezing point at 100?

Anders Celsius, a professor of astronomy at Uppsala, proposed the upside-down scale in 1742. It was flipped into the familiar form within a few years.

Which naturalist conceived natural selection independently of Charles Darwin while working in the Malay Archipelago?

Alfred Russel Wallace also mapped the Wallace Line, the divide between animals of Asian and Australasian origin in Indonesia. His 1858 paper was published alongside extracts from Darwin's writings.

Which Dutch draper from Delft, using single-lens microscopes he made himself, was the first to observe bacteria?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was largely self-taught, yet he was also the first to document red blood cells, muscle fibres and spermatozoa. He is often called the father of microbiology.

Which Austrian-born physicist helped discover nuclear fission but was passed over when Otto Hahn won the Nobel?

Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch gave the process the name fission in a 1939 report in the journal Nature. Element 109, meitnerium, was named after her in 1997.

Which Hungarian doctor slashed deaths at a Vienna maternity clinic by making staff wash their hands in 1847?

Ignaz Semmelweis saw the death rate fall from 18% to under 2%, yet offended doctors mocked him. He was committed to an asylum in 1865.

Which chief librarian of Alexandria first calculated Earth's circumference from shadows in two Egyptian cities?

Eratosthenes compared noon shadows at Alexandria with Syene, modern Aswan, where rods cast no shadow at all. The distance between the cities was put at about 5,000 stadia.

Which Danish nobleman, who lost part of his nose in a duel, is called the greatest astronomer before telescopes?

Tycho Brahe wore a prosthetic nose for the rest of his life. The Danish king gave him the island of Hven, where he built Uraniborg, the first large observatory in Christian Europe.

Luis and Walter Alvarez linked the dinosaurs' extinction to an asteroid after finding which rare metal in rock layers?

Iridium turned up at hundreds of times its normal concentration in the layer laid down when the dinosaurs died out. The Chicxulub crater in Mexico was later identified as the likely impact site.

Which anatomist's book De Humani Corporis Fabrica challenged Galen by relying on dissection of human bodies?

Andreas Vesalius did the dissecting himself and urged his students to do the same. Before him, lecturers read from classical texts while a barber-surgeon cut up an animal.

The Latinised name of ninth-century Baghdad scholar al-Khwarizmi gave English which word used in computing?

Algorithm comes from Algoritmi, the Latin form of his name, used in a translation of his treatise on Indian numerals. The word algebra comes from the title of another of his books.

In which American city did Enrico Fermi's team start the first nuclear reactor beneath a sports stadium's stands?

Chicago hosted the experiment even though the project's leaders feared a runaway reaction in a crowded city; they trusted Fermi's safety calculations. The reactor first ran on 2 December 1942.