Page 15 - All About History - Issue 11-14

Science

ISAAC NEWTON Edward Jenner
BRITISH 1749-1823
BRITISH 1642-1727 We have all benefited from the
work of Edward Jenner in one
A principal figure in 17th and early- way or another, who developed
18th-century science, Isaac Newton the science behind vaccines. He
developed the law of gravity (the was able to treat the killer disease
smallpox by inoculating people
famous story of an apple falling on his
against it using cowpox, the
head probably wasn’t true though) and lesser form of the disease, after
the resulting laws of motion, showing noticing that milkmaids who Edward
how gravity could account for the caught cowpox never seemed Jenner was widely
orbits of the planets. He also designed to contract smallpox. Jenner ridiculed for his work
experimented on several – critics claimed it was
the reflecting telescope, developed
children, including his ungodly to inoculate
calculus and discussed the nature of own, to perfect the
light and colour. His reputation may treatment, and today someone with bacteria
have been of a man who could be rude vaccines have saved from a diseased
and difficult to work with but science millions of lives animal
while smallpox has
is grateful for his endeavours.
Newton developed the been all
law of gravity but eradicated.
“ A man should look for what
is, and not for what he thinks

should be”Albert Einstein
Dmitri Mendeleev
RUSSIAN 1834-1907
All of modern-day chemistry has its basis
in the work of Dmitri Mendeleev, who
created the Periodic Table of Elements, a
way of classifying and ordering the elements
according to their atomic weight and chemical
properties, showing that the most common
elements, like hydrogen, had the smallest
atomic weight. When he created the table in
1869, he realised there
were gaps where
undiscovered
elements existed
and hence
Einstein failed predicted their
the test to the Swiss discovery.
Federal Polytechnical
School the first time,
passing maths and
science but flunking
CHARLES DARWIN
the rest
BRITISH 1809-1882
The naturalist and geologist began formulating his ideas on
evolution when on board the ship The Beagle for five years. He
Albert Einstein thought that not just humans, but all species that wander the planet
GERMAN 1879-1955 have evolved over time from common ancestors. He suggested
Einstein has become a cultural icon for that some biological traits became more or less common thanks to
his trailblazing work, but while he won natural selection – what we now know to be one of the cornerstones
the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his work on
the photoelectric effect he is best known of modern biology. Getting the scientific community to accept his
for his Special and General theories of and fellow scientist Alfred Russel Wallace’s work was a struggle,
relativity. The former was published in though, and Darwin’s book On The Origin Of Species was originally
1905 and described how nothing can travel received with ridicule.
faster than the speed of light and how that
speed is independent of an observer’s frame
of reference. The General theory showed Mendeleev’s discoveries in
how energy and mass are equivalent in the physics and chemistry laid Who did we miss out?
the groundwork for many
famous equation E=mc and how mass can of today’s studies
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