Quantum Leap

Scientists and Inventors who

changed the world

Edwin Hubble

Edwin Powell Hubble (1889 – 1953), an American astronomer known because of the space telescope named after him, revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos. He was almost lost to astronomy, first to boxing, then to the law. The young Hubble was such a fine fighter during University boxing promoters tried to persuade him to turn professional.

After serving and being injured in the first world war, he finally had the chance to observe the stars professionally, taking up a post in the Mount Wilson Observatory in California in 1919, where he would spend the rest of his career.

Hubble profoundly changed understanding of the universe by confirming the existence of galaxies other than our own, the Milky Way. He also helped establish that the universe is expanding.

Blaise Pascal

• During his twenties Pascal spent a large amount of time undertaking experiments in the field of physics. The most important of these involved air pressure.

• 1644 - Pascal invents and produces a calculating device; in effect this is the first digital calculator.

• 1647 he - proves that air pressure decreases at higher altitudes.

• He developed Pascal’s Principle or Law that says that enclosed space distributes equally in all directions.

• This became the basic principle from which all hydraulic systems derived, such as those involved in the manufacture of car brakes, as well as explaining how small devices such as the car jack are able to raise a vehicle.

• This is because the small force created by moving the jacking handle in a sizeable sweep equates to a large amount of pressure.

• Applying the lessons of his studies in a practical way, Pascal went on to invent the syringe and, in 1650, the hydraulic press.

Michael Faraday

• Michael Faraday 1791 - 1867 is regarded as one of the greatest experimental scientist of all time.

• His discoveries and inventions, amongst them the electric motor, electric generator and the transformer, have had a profound impact on modern life.

• His work played a key role in the development of electricity for use in technology.

• He also invented a simple Bunsen burner. • Faraday had only a basic education and was from a family that

was not well off. • He had only a minimal understanding of mathematical concepts

but was still able to produce some of the most important scientific concepts in history and did so in a language that was clear and easily understood.

• Faraday was a man of honor who was strong in his convictions. He rejected both a knighthood and an offer to become President of the Royal Society as well turning down a burial in Westminster Abbey.

• He also refused to assist the British government in the production of chemical weapons for use in war.

Albert Einstein• Einstein is considered to be greatest

physicist ever Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles. Most were about physics.  

• 1902: Einstein begins work at Swiss patent office.

• 1905: Publishes theory of relativity.

• 1916: Proposes general theory of relativity; is proved correct three years later.

• 1922: Wins Nobel prize in Physics.• 1933: Emigrates to America• 1939: Urges Franklin D. Roosevelt

to develop the atomic bomb.• 18 April 1955: Dies in his sleep.

• When he was a clerk in a Swiss patent office Einstein realized that Newton's law of gravity while right most of the time, was incorrect when talking about very large and very distant objects. 

• Einstein revised Newton's laws of gravity to make them more accurate.  We call what he developed the theory of relativity.

• It is actually two theories.  The first is called Special Relativity.  This theory states that it is impossible to determine whether or not you are moving unless you can look at another object.

• Think about that.  If you were in the middle of outer space far from any other objects how would you know whether or not you were moving?  All movement is relative to other objects.

• For example, right now relative to your computer you are not moving at all, but relative to the distant quasars you are moving at near the speed of light. 

• Relative to the Earth most meteorites move at about 25,000 miles an hour, but if you were standing on a meteorite looking at another meteorite going in the same direction as you, and at the same speed it would not appear to move at all.

• Special Relativity also says that the speed of light is always constant.  This means that no matter what you do to light it will always go the same speed. 

• The Theory of General Relativity is the one which redefined the laws of gravity.  It says that it is impossible to tell the difference between gravity and the force of inertia from a moving object. 

• In other words if you climb inside of a spinning spacecraft the inertia will cause you to move towards the outside walls in a way that would feel just like gravity. 

• This is why future spacecraft designs often have large spinning cylinders attached to them. 

• The Theory of General Relativity also says that large objects cause outer space to bend in the same way a marble laid onto a large thin sheet of rubber would cause the rubber to bend. 

• The larger the object, the further space bends.  Just like a  bowling ball would make the rubber sheet bend much more then the marble would.

Alexander Fleming

• In 1928, while studying influenza, Fleming noticed that mould had developed accidentally on a set of culture dishes being used to grow the staphylococci germ. The mould had created a bacteria-free circle around itself.

• Fleming experimented further and named the active substance penicillin.

• It was two other scientists however, Australian Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who developed penicillin further so that it could be produced as a drug.

• At first supplies of penicillin were very limited, but by the 1940s it was being mass-produced.

• Although it was in fact others who facilitated the latter development it was Fleming who became revered as a hero.

Guglielmo Marconi• Guglielmo Marconi was a brilliant collaborator and

manipulator of other scientists’ findings. The most important of his breakthroughs was the discovery of radio waves in 1888.

• He received a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909.• He had the advantage of a large family estate and a

wealthy background.• Government, military and postal departments quickly

became interested in the potential uses of the new technology and within a few more years, enthusiasm was widespread.

• This came largely after his first overseas radio transmission between Britain and France in 1899, after which he was brought to the attention of the public.

• But the event which made Marconi world famous, and the one which silenced many of the doubters about the practical and scientific uses of his equipment who still persisted, was the two thousand mile transmission of Morse code across the Atlantic in 1901. Many had thought this an impossible task.

Pythagoras• He is often revered as a great

mathematician, mystic and scientist, and he is best known for the Pythagorean theorem which bears his name.

• Pythagoras conceptualised the world as a sphere.

• Pythagoras’ famous theorem’ The square of the hypotenuse on a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

. • He was born on the island of Samos, and

may have travelled widely in his youth, visiting Egypt and other places seeking knowledge.

• Around 530 BC, he moved to southern Italy, and there set up a religious sect.

• His followers pursued the religious rites and practices developed by Pythagoras, and studied his philosophical theories.

Johannes Gutenberg

• Johannes Gutenberg (1398 - 1468) was a German goldsmith, printer and publisher who introduced modern book printing.

• Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing, in around 1439, and the global inventor of the printing press.

• His invention played a key role in the spread of learning to the masses.

• What Gutenberg mastered was the idea of placing individual metal letters into temporary mounts, which could then be dismantled or moved once a page of text had been completed and reused to produce other pages.

• The earliest printed piece attributed to him is a Calendar for 1448.

• Much more famous is the first bible printed using moveable type known as the forty two line bible because of lines to a page.

• It is believed Gutenberg and his assistants made the copies between 1450 and 1456.

• Some sources credit the Chinese with inventing moveable type printing, using characters made of wood in the early fourteenth century.

• It is almost certain however that Gutenberg developed his ideas independently and was unaware of any similar developments which may or may not have taken place on the other side of the world more than a century before him.

Marie Curie

• Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867 –1934) was a Polish-born French physicist and chemist famous for her work on radioactivity.

• She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity and the first person honoured with two Nobel Prizes—in physics and chemistry.

• She was born in Warsaw. In 1891, she went to study in Paris, conducted her subsequent scientific work.

• She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris.

• Her husband Pierre Curie shared her Nobel prize in physics. Her daughter and son-in-law also shared a Nobel prize.

• Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields.

• Her achievements include the creation of a theory of radioactivity and the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium.

• Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of cancers using radioactive isotopes.

Aristotle•

When Aristotle was a young man, about 350 BC, he went to study at Plato's Academy. Later he left Athens and went to Macedon to be the tutor of the young prince Alexander, who grew up to be Alexander the Great. When Alexander became king, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened his own school there, the Lyceum (lie-SAY-um), in competition with Plato's Academy. Both schools were successful for hundreds of years.

• Aristotle was very interested in science, maybe because his father was a doctor. He wanted to use logical methods to figure out how the real world worked; so he is really the father of today's scientific method. Aristotle was especially interested in biology, in classifying plants and animals in a way that would make sense.

• When Alexander was traveling all over Western Asia, he had his messengers bring strange plants back to Aristotle for his studies. Aristotle also made efforts to create order in governments. He created a classification system of monarchies, oligarchies, tyrannies, democracies and republics which we still use today.

Leonardo da Vinci

• He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas.

• He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.

• He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.

• Leonardo described and sketched ideas for many inventions hundreds of years ahead of their time. But it seems the very few of these were ever built and tested during his life.

• Though his notes suggest that he wished to organize and publish his ideas, he died before he could accomplish this important goal. After his death, his notebooks were hidden away, scattered, or lost, and his wonderful ideas were forgotten.

• Centuries passed before other inventors came up with similar ideas and brought them to practical use.

Louis Pasteur

• Pasteur was a French chemist and biologist who proved the germ theory of disease and invented pasteurisation.

• Louis Pasteur was born in 1822 in France. After several years research and teaching he was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Lille. Part of his job was to find solutions to the practical problems of local industries, particularly the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. He was able to demonstrate that organisms such as bacteria were responsible for souring wine, beer and milk, and that the bacteria could be removed by boiling and then cooling the liquid. This process is now called pasteurisation.

• He experimented to find where these bacteria came from, and was able to prove that they were introduced from the environment. Later he was asked to help the silk industry in France, where there was an epidemic amongst the silkworms. He soon identified parasitic infections as the cause and advocated that only disease-free eggs should be selected. The industry was saved.

• Pasteur's various investigations convinced him of the rightness of the germ theory of disease, which holds that germs attack the body from outside. Many felt that such tiny organisms as germs could not possibly kill larger ones such as humans. Pasteur now used his theory to explain the causes of many diseases - including anthrax, cholera, TB and smallpox - and their prevention by vaccination. He also worked on the development of vaccines for rabies. In 1888, a special institute was founded in Paris for the treatment of diseases. When he died he was a national hero and was given a state funeral.

Issac Newton

• Sir Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727) was an English scientist who made great contributions to physics, optics, math and astronomy. He was the greatest scientist of his day, perhaps of all time. But while Isaac Newton was busy discovering the universal law of gravitation, he was also searching out hidden meanings in the Bible and pursuing the covert art of alchemy.

• Newton is best known for his Three Laws of Motions and the Universal Law of Gravitation.

• Have you heard the story about an apple dropping on Newton's head?

• Newton's Three Laws of Motion

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin had a very bright and had a very curious mind. Franklin's ideas and inventions typically came about because he saw something that needed to be improved and he took the initiative to do it.

• 1706 I - 1790 • Founding Father: One of five men who helped draft the United States Declaration of Independence• Famous Firsts from Ben Franklin• Ben Franklin created many systems that changed the lives of Americans not only in his lifetime, but for Americans

for centuries to come. His innovations literally changed the way many Americans live and work.• Public Hospitals: Franklin was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1751, which was the first public

hospital in the country. Before this, there was no help for public health system for the poor. The public hospital system that Americans know today is modeled after the Pennsylvania Hospital.

• Public Library: In the early 18th century, books were mainly available to wealthy people, whom had their own private libraries. In 1751, Franklin developed the concept of a subscription library, where members paid a fee and shared books amongst themselves. This system served as the model for the public library system.

• Post Office: Franklin was once the country's postmaster general. During that time, he instituted regular mail routes, a standard fee structure and an internal auditing system. Many of the systems are still in use by the postal service today.

• Volunteer Fire Department: In 1752, Franklin organized the first volunteer fire department in Philadelphia. The success led to other volunteer fire departments in the city.

• Fire Insurance: Franklin also was responsible for creating the first fire insurance company in 1752. Subscribers paid a fee for the assurance of having their property repaired or replaced if it was damaged in a fire.

• 10 Jobs Held by Ben Franklin• An interesting fact about Ben Franklin's life is that he had many different jobs. Here are ten jobs that he had in his

career.• Printer, Writer, Politician, Inventor, Scientist ., volunteer firefighter, Librarian , Postmaster Bookstore owner, Soldier

Ben Franklin's Inventions• Another interesting fact about Ben Franklin is that he is invented many things that are still used today. Bifocals • Lightning rod Swimming fins The Franklin stove, an iron fireplace that produced less smoke and used less wood. • Glass armonica, a musical instrument • Fun Ben Franklin Facts for Kids• He taught himself five different languages: Latin, German, Spanish, Italian and French. • Franklin crossed the Atlantic Ocean eight times and spent 27 years of his life living in other countries.