James Smithson – English scientist and philanthropist

James Smithson was born as James Lewis Macie in England about the year 1754. He was a natural son of Hugh Smithson, first Duke of Northumberland, his mother being a Mrs. Elizabeth Macie, of an old family in Wiltshire of the name of Hungerford.

He was the illegitimate offspring of Hugh Smithson, later known as Sir Hugh Percy, who rose from a merchant class background to become the Duke of Northumberland after marrying advantageously.

Hugh Smithson, his father, was distinguished as a member of one of the most illustrious houses of Great Britain, and also because of his alliance with the renowned family of Percy.

James Smithson has been known as the wealthy and eccentric Englishman who bequeathed his fortune to the US government ‘to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge’.

When he was 17 years old, James Lewis Macie matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he not only showed an aptitude for chemistry and mineralogy but also engaged in his first serious fieldwork. The brilliant physicist Henry Cavendish, for whom Macie briefly worked as a laboratory assistant, served as one of his scientific mentors. Macie soon positioned himself as “a serious scientist” with a reputation for “scrupulous laboratory methods”.

While still attending college, he managed to join the prominent French geologist Barthélemy Faujas de St. Fond on his tour of Scotland, with a group of distinguished scientists.

Within a year after his graduation from Oxford in 1786, he gained election as a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Smithson died in Genoa, Italy on 27 June 1829. By the time he died in 1829, he had published 29 scientific papers, most of which detailed the chemical composition of minerals and various other substances (including a human tear).
James Smithson – English scientist and philanthropist

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17th,1857 in the village of Izhevskaya in the province of Ryazan. He was the son of a Polish deportee to Siberia. The boy lost his hearing at age nine as a result of scarlet fever; four years later his mother died.

At 14, however, he took up mathematics and natural sciences and resumed his studies, making use of his father's library. The parents of the young Tsiolkovsky saw a great ability for science in their son, together with an inclination toward self-study and an unquestionable talent for invention. He was sent to Moscow to obtain an education and to study industry. He was accomplished in both science and mathematics and became a teacher at Kaluga, Russia. Even as a teacher, Tsiolkovsky found time to learn.

In his flat, he arranged a small laboratory, where 'electric lightning flashed and thunder rattled'. His most impressive display was that of an electric 'octopus'.

In 1894 Tsiolkovsky designed a monoplane that was not flown until 1915. He built the first Russian wind tunnel in 1897. He also was an insightful visionary who thought a great deal about the uses of his beloved rockets to explore and master space. He was the author of Investigations of Outer Space by Rocket Devices (1911) and Aims of Astronauts (1914).

Some of Tsiolkovsky’s solutions gave scientists in America and Russia ideas when they began to think about space travel. They also thought about airplanes they and other people had made, and even big bombs that could fly themselves very long distances.

At the end of the 19th century, Tsiolkovsky began research in the field of spaceship building in Russia, and made a great number of original designs for rockets. He showed that the most efficient way of launching rockets into space is to arrange them in packets or series of rockets, 'staging' as it is known today.

Tsiolkovsky is remembered for believing in the dominance of humanity throughout space, also known as anthropocosmism. He had grand ideas about space industrialization and the exploitation of its resources. Tsiolkovsky has been honored since his death in 1935. A far side moon crater is named in his honor. In 1989 he was invested in the International Aerospace Hall of Fame.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Grace Hopper: a pioneer of computer programming

Like many highly educated young American women during the 1930s, Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) came from a well-established Anglo-Saxon family.

The Murray home at 316 West 95th Street in New York City, filled with books, provided an environment in which young Grace’s academic ambitions were supported and encourage. Grace matriculated at Vassar College in 1924 and pursued a graduate degree in mathematics and physics at Yale University.

Supported by a loving family Grace Murray Hopper completed her dissertation in 1934 and received her doctorate in mathematics from Yale.

When World War II started, Grace Hopper joined the United States Naval Reserves as a lieutenant, where she was assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard University.

She developed the concept of automatic programming with a compiling system using works instead of mathematical symbols. For this concept she helped develop the computer language called COBOL (common business-oriented language).
Grace Hopper: a pioneer of computer programming

Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Heafield Hamilton was born on August 17 1936 in Paoli, Indiana.  After receiving her undergraduate degree in mathematics, she married and taught math and French in public school while her husband completed college.

After the couple moved to Boston, Hamilton planed to enroll in graduate school, but obtained a job at MIT as a programmer for a professor doing meteorological prediction and statistical long-range weather forecasting.

Hamilton worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 to do programming for another metrological professor. She wrote the computer code for the moon-bound spacecraft. In her study of software developed for these missions,

Hamilton tracked a variety of causes of software error – most notably interface errors. Hamilton popularized the term ‘software engineering’ and developed several aspects of today’s computing machines, such as the concept of asynchronous software, priority scheduling or end-to-end testing.
Margaret Hamilton

Thomas Willis (1621-1675)

One of the most distinguished members of the Royal Society during its formative years was the English physician Thomas Willis. The first publication of Thomas Willis appeared in 1659 and included the important De fermentation, in which clearly indicated the importance of chemistry.

Willis was born in Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, England on January 27, 1621. He had taken his BA at Christ Church, Oxford in 1639 and he had followed this with an MA three years later.

During the Civil War, he had served with royalists in the defense of Oxford and was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed the Sedleian Professor of Natural philosophy in 1660.  In the same year he returned to his studies, which resulted in a B.Med degree in 1646.

Willis provided the first modern definition of typhoid fever, myasthenia gravis, and childbed fever latter renamed puerperal fever at Willis’s suggestion.

Thomas Willis

In each case, he furnished careful and detailed description of the signs and symptoms, duration and severity of the disease, the nature of relapses and recommended methods of treatment.

In 1664 Willis described in his treatise about a circle of arteries at the base of the brain that act as a traffic for the blood flowing to the head.

His work, assisted by a group of highly skilled colleagues known as the Vertuosi, combined other things anatomical knowledge, autopsies, clinical observation and experimentation.

Willis landmark text, Cerebri Anatome, 1664, was reproduced many times and developed into a pocket-sized standard textbook for medical students.

The circle of Willis provides a potential diversion for collateral blood supply following the occlusion of one major cranial arteries feeding, into it.

Because of Willis’s thorough illustrations and explanation of this structure, it is known today as the circle of Willis.

He died of pneumonia on November II, 1675, in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Thomas Willis (1621-1675)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Wolfgang von Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 into a well to do family in Frankfurt am Main.

His parents were citizens of that imperial town and Wolfgang was their only son.

Between 1752 and 1765, he was privately educated. He has tutors in French, Hebrew, Italia and English. His early reading includes the poetry of Klopstock, Homer in translation, the Bible and French Classical dramatists.

During the romantic era, Wolfgang von Goethe was also a scientist and philosopher of science, as well as a friend and intellectual colleague of leading German scientist, including Alexander von Humboldt.

He was a scientist and patron of science and technology, with notably publications in anatomy, botany and chromatics.

He is most remembered for his work in optics, in which he attempted unsuccessfully to dethrone Newton’s theory of the composition of white light from rays of colored light.

In his late years he was celebrated as a sage and visited by world luminaries. The greatest figure of German Romanticism, he is regarded as a giant of world literature.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in the 30th of November 1858 in Faridpur in Dacca District. His father Bhagaban Chandra Bose was a Deputy Magistrate.

Jagadish Chandra Bose had his early education in village school in Bengla medium.  In 1869, Jagadish Chandra Bose was sent to Calcutta to learn English and was educated at St. Xavier’s School and College. He graduated with degree in science from St. Xavier’s College Calcutta in 1879.

In London he first studied medicine. But he repeatedly fell ill. So he had to discontinue the course. In 1880, he received admission and studied Natural Science in Christ Church College, Cambridge.

At Cambridge, he worked with a professor of physics, Lord Rayleigh. It was here that he befriended with the famous biologist Dr Sidney Vines and became interested in biology.

Returned from Cambridge in 1885, he was appointed a Professor of Physics in Presidency College, Calcutta. Here, he initiated his experiments in various areas in physics and botany.

He invented wireless telegraphy in 1895 a year before Guglielmo Marconi patented his invention.

He converted a small enclosure adjoining a bathroom in the Presidency College into a laboratory. He carried out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization.

Chandra Bose received the D.Sc degree of London University in 1896 for his work on the determination of wavelength of electric radiation by diffraction grating.

In 1915, he left the university to found the Bose Research Institute, Calcutta.  He was able to interest the world’s scientists in his work and his fame grew. Jagadish Chandra Bose died on November 23, 1937.
Jagadish Chandra Bose

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790)

Benjamin Franklin was a principal leader of the American Revolution. Before the war for independence Franklin earned fame as Philadelphia publisher and writer and world recognition as a scientist and inventor.

He was born in Boston. He was the 15th of 17th children. His father was a soap and candlemaker, who immigrated to United States from England.

At the age 12, Benjamin went to work as an apprentice to his older brother James who is a printer.

Benjamin Franklin

In 1723 Franklin moved to Philadelphia and worked as a printer. In 1724, he travelled to London, England to buy printing equipment. When he found himself stranded and without money, he went to work as a printer.

Benjamin was a great scientific thinker and inventor. He invented the Franklin stove, which was used to heat rooms, and a type of eyeglass called bifocals.  Benjamin also invented brighter street light, swim fins and library seats with built in stairs.

His experiments with electricity led to the invention of the lightning rod.

He served as deputy postmaster-general for the colonies and on the committee in the Second Continental Congress responsible for drafting the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790)

Bertram Brockhouse

Bertram Brockhouse 

Bertram Brockhouse was “awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter and particularly for the development of neutron spectroscopy.” 

The work for which he was recognized was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s and it helped answer “the question of what atoms do!” 

Bertram Brockhouse was born in Lethbridge, Alberta, in 1918 and briefly attended a one room prairie schoolhouse before the family moved to Vancouver, but the family was uprooted again in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression. 

They went to Chicago for three years to try to improve their precarious financial situation. While in Chicago, Bertram began to design and repair radios, which probably sparked his later interest in physics and electronic equipment. 

The family returned to Vancouver in 1938 and when war broke out, Brockhouse enlisted in the Royal Canadian navy. 

In1944, he spent 6 months at the Nova Scotia technical College in an electrical engineering course and then he was assigned to the National Research Council in Ottawa. 

Canada had made a commitment on nuclear energy in the late 1940s and 1950s and the Atomic Energy Project of the National Research Council was strongly supported by the Government both politically and financially. 

He solved one problem after another and eventually came up with his own design for a triple-axis spectrometer. 

The instrument enabled him to bombard solid materials with slow moving neutrons produced in the reactor. 

That, in turn, allowed him to calculate the strength of the forces that bond atoms together. His neutrons spectrometer was so successful that it is now used worldwide. 

A special feature of hi spectrometer was its ability to vary three angles: the direction of the neutron beam, the position o the specimen and the angle of the detector. With access to one of the world’s best nuclear reactor facilities and his new spectrometer, Brockhouse was able to explore the tiny inner-world of the atom for the next twelve years. 

It was during this period that he and his neutron spectrometer accomplished the work that led to his Nobel Prize. 

He was appointed professor of physics at McMaster University in Hamilton which had the only university-sited nuclear reactor in Canada at the time. 

When Brockhouse was named as the recipient of the 1994 Nobel prize in Physics, he had already been retired since 1984. 

Bertram Brockhouse

John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)
John Desmond Bernal, British physicist. His pioneering work in the field of X-ray crystallography enabled the structure of many complex molecules to be elucidated.

Bernal came from an Irish farming family. Brought up as a Catholic, he was educated at Stonyhurst and Cambridge, where he abandoned Catholicism and became (1923) an active member of the Communist Party. After Cambridge, Bernal spent four years at the Royal Institution in London learning the practical details of X-ray crystallography from Sir William Bragg.

When he returned to Cambridge in 1927 he planned a research program to reveal the complete three-dimensional structure of complex molecules, including those found exclusively in living organisms, by the techniques of X-ray crystallography.

In 1933 Bernal succeeded in obtaining photographs of single crystal proteins and went on to study the tobacco mosaic virus. It was not, however, Bernal’s own achievements in crystallography, as much as those of his pupils and colleagues, such as Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, that brought about the revolution in biochemistry and launched the subject of molecular biology.

In 1937 Bernal was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck College, London. His attempts to develop the department were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Despite his known membership of the Communist party and against the advice of the security forces, Bernal spent much of the war as adviser to Earl Mountbatten.

In 1945 he returned to Birkbeck College and in 1963 was appointed to a chair of crystallography. In the same year he suffered a stroke and although he continued to work for some time, a second and more severe stroke in 1965 paralyzed him down one side and virtually ended Bernal’s scientific life.

His books include The Social Function of Science (1939), Science In History (1958), and the Origin of Life (1967).
John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany. Einstein contributed more than any other scientist since Sir Isaac Newton to our understanding of physical reality.

Einstein worked at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland from 1902 to 1909. During this period he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications, written in his spare time, without the benefit of close contact with scientific literature or colleagues.

The most well known of these works is Einstein's 1905 paper proposing "the special theory of relativity." He based his new theory on the principle that the laws of physics are in the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference.

Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent expressing it in the famous equation: E=mc2 (energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared). This equation became a cornerstone in the development of nuclear energy.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 but not for relativity, rather for his 1905 work on the photoelectric effect. He worked on at Princeton until the end of his life on an attempt to unify the laws of physics.
Albert Einstein

Enrico Fermi

Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi (September 29, 1901 – November 28, 1954) was an Italian physicist most noted for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics.

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy. His father was Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and his mother was Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher. As a young boy he attended local grammar school and enjoyed learning physics and mathematics and shared his interests with his older brother, Giulio.

In 1918 Fermi enrolled at the prestigious Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, where he was later to receive his undergraduate and doctoral degree. In order to enter the Institute, candidates had to take an entrance exam which included an essay. For his essay on the given theme Characteristics of Sound, 17-year-old Fermi chose to derive and solve the Fourier analysis based partial differential equation for waves on a string.

In 1921, his third year at the university, he published his first scientific works on the Italian magazine Nuovo Cimento: the first was entitled: "On the dynamic of a solid system of electrical charges in transient conditions"; the second: "On the electrostatic of a uniform gravitational field of electromagnetic charges and on the weight of electromagnetic charges".

In 1923, he was awarded a scholarship from Italian Government and spent some month with Professor Max Born in Gottingen. With a Rockefeller Fellowship, in 1924, he move to Leyden to work with P. Ehrenfest, later return to Italy for the post of lecturer in mathematical Physics and mechanics at the University of Florence.

When he was only 24 years old, Fermi took a professorship at the University of Rome (first in atomic physics in Italy) which he won in a competition held by Professor Orso Mario Corbino, director of the Institute of Physics.

In 1938, Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics at the age of 37 for his work on nuclear processes.

After Fermi received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm, he, his wife Laura, and their children immigrated to New York and began working with Columbia University.

After became American citizen and at the end of the war Fermi then went to the University of Chicago and began studies that led to the construction of the first nuclear pile Chicago Pile-1.

Fermi was widely regarded as the only physicist of the twentieth century who excelled both theoretically and experimentally.

He died of cancer at the University of Chicago on November 28, 1954. Fermi is remembered as the "father of the atomic bomb."
Enrico Fermi

Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff

Van 't Hoff was born at Rotterdam in the Netherlands, the son of a physician. From a young age he was interested in science and nature; he frequently took part in botanical excursions, and his receptiveness for philosophy and his predilection for poetry were already apparent in his early school years.

He studied at Delft Polytechnic and the University of Leiden. He finally received his doctorate at the University of Utrecht in 1874.

In 1874 van ‘t Hoff published a paper entitled A Suggestion Looking to the Extension into Space of the Structural Formulas at Present Used in Chemistry, which effectively created a new branch of science – stereochemistry.

Van ‘t Hoff helped to found the discipline of physical chemistry as many people known it today.

Van ‘t Hoff became a lecturer in chemistry and physics at the Veterinary College in Utrecht.

He then became a professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology at the University of Amsterdam for almost 18 years before eventually becoming the chairman and the chemistry department.

In 1896 van ‘t Hoff moved to Germany where he finished his career at the University of Berlin in 1911.
In 1901 van 't Hoff was awarded the first Nobel Prize for chemistry.
Jacobus Henricus Van 't Hoff

Andrew Schally

Andrew Schally
Andrew Schally, the Polish American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1977 for his discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain, spent five years (1952 to 1957) in Montreal at McGill University studying endocrinology and carrying out research. Endocrinology is the branch of medicine concerned with endocrine gland s which includes the pituitary, thyroid and adrenal glands as well as the pancreas, ovaries and testicles. He received his PhD from McGill in 1957 and moved that same year to the United States where he has remained ever since, Schally became an American citizen in 1962.

Born in Wilno, Poland, in 1926, Schally survived the years of World War II in the Polish Jewish community in Romania. After the war, he continued his studies in Scotland and at the University of London where he also played some British cub football. He was employed as junior researcher at the national Institute of Medical Research for two years.

He immigrated to Canada in 1952 then became citizen during his five years in Canada. His work began in Montreal and continued in the United States, he investigated hormonal secretions of the pituitary gland and the closely related hypothalamus in the brain, and how the two interrelated. Very little was known about the hypothalamus hormones Schally’s work. He also pioneered the potential application of these hormones in the field of cancer treatment, and he continues to explore the field of hormone-dependent tumors.

He was the recipient of many international awards and honorary degrees including the Charles Mickle Award of the University of Toronto and Gairdner Foundation International Award of Canada.
Andrew Schally