Literature and Science :  

Modern Scientists : Timeline

1850-1936

Henri Louis Le Chatelier - French industrial chemist; in 1888 made the observation:

"Any change in one of the variables that determines the state of a system in

equilibrium causes a shift in the position of equilibrium in a direction that tends to counteract the change in the variable under consideration."

1852-1908

Antoine-Henri Becquerel - French physicist; discovered natural radioactivity (1896); shared the Nobel Prize for physics for this discovery (1903).

1852-1916

William Ramsay - English chemist; president of the Society of Chemical Industry; shared discovery of argon (1894), Krypton (1898), and xenon (1898); independently discovered helium on earth (1895); received Nobel Prize for chemistry for discoveries of these rare, or "noble" elements (1904).

1852-1919

Emil Hermann Fischer - German organic chemist; analyzed structures of carbohydrates, proteins, enzymes and amino acids.

1854-1915

Paul Ehrlich - German chemist and bacteriologist; proposed a chemical explanation of immunity.

1856-1940

Joseph John Thomson - English physicist; researched atomic structure; discovered that atoms contained particles which he called "electrons"; developed the "plum pudding" or "raisin muffin," model of the atom which consisted of electrons embedded in a positive sphere of matter (1904); received Nobel Prize for physics (1907); developed the mass spectrograph with Francis William Aston (1919).

1859-1906

Pierre Curie - French physicist; researched radioactivity, he and wife, Marie, discovered radium and polonium (1898); they shared the Nobel Prize for physics (1903) with Antoine-Henri Becquerel.

1859-1927

Svante August Arrhenius - Swedish physicist and chemist; originated the modern theory of ionization of electrolytes; received the Nobel Prize for chemistry (1903).

1864-1943

George Washington Carver - American agricultural chemist.

1867-1934

Marie Curie - French physicist; researched radioactivity; she and husband, Pierre, discovered radium and polonium (1898); they shared the Nobel Prize for physics (1903) with Becquerel; Marie received the Nobel Prize for chemistry (1911).

1868-1928

Theodore William Richards - American chemist - recognized during his lifetime as the leading authority in atomic-weight determinations. A Harvard University graduate, he served as full professor at Harvard from 1901 to 1928. Using superior gravimetric methods and applying physicochemical principles, he determined the atomic weights of a large number of elements with an accuracy never surpassed. His detection of the varying atomic weight of lead in 1913 coincided with the discovery of isotopes by Frederick Soddy. Richards was awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize for chemistry. (January 31, 1868 - April 2, 1928)

1871-1937

Ernest Rutherford (Baron Rutherford of Nelson) (Lord Rutherford) - British physicist from New Zealand; discovered several radioactive isotopes with colleagues (1899-1905); classified forms of radiation as alpha, beta, and gamma; received Nobel Prize for chemistry (1908); worked on submarine detection during WWII; developed atomic theory (1911); researched transmutational effects of alpha particles on gases (ca. 1919) and other elements.

1875-1946

Gilbert Newton Lewis - American physical chemist; developed atomic theory; proposed the octet rule and the electron dot method of showing valence electrons; important contributor to acid-base theory and thermodynamics.

1877-1945

Francis William Aston - English physicist and chemist - discovered in 1919 that stable elements of low atomic weight are mixtures of isotopes. Using a mass spectrograph, which he developed while working with Sir Joseph John Thomson in Cambridge, and for which he received the 1922 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Aston also found that the masses of most atoms could be expressed as whole numbers when compared with oxygen (mass 16). With a more accurate spectrograph, however, Aston detected in 1927 a slight deviation from this whole-number rule. By graphing an index of the deviation (called the packing fraction) against the closest whole-number mass of an element, Aston derived important information concerning its structure and stability. (September 1, 1877 - November 20, 1945).

1877-1956

Frederick Soddy - British physicist received (1921) the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the conception of isotopes and the displacement law of radioactive change. With Ernest Rutherford he developed the disintegration theory of radioactivity, which explained radioactivity as the decay of atoms to form other elements. Soddy proposed the isotope concept--that atoms could have the same chemical identity but different atomic weights. His displacement law of radioactive change suggests that an element emitting an alpha particle becomes a new element with a lower atomic number, whereas emission of a beta particle raises the element's atomic number. (September 2, 1877 - September 22, 1956)

1878-1968

Lise Meitner - Austrian physicist; together with her nephew Otto R. Frisch, published a theoretical interpretation of nuclear fission in 1939; collaborated with Otto Hahn of Germany to discover protactinium (1917) the element from which actinium is formed; became head (1917-1938) of the physics department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin; also collaborated with Hahn and Fritz Strassmann to accomplish the fission of uranium (1938); Fleeing Nazi persecution, she resumed her work at Sweden's Nobel Institute; her theoretical work helped clarify the relationships between beta and gamma rays and stimulated Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in their discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei.

1879-1947

Johannes Nicolaus Bronsted - Danish chemist, best known for his theory of acids and bases (1923), according to which an acid is a proton donor and a base is a proton acceptor. While professor (1908-1947) of physical and inorganic chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, he produced outstanding papers in thermodynamics (heat and its relationship to other forms of energy) and kinetics (the effect of forces upon the motion of material bodies.

1879-1955

Albert Einstein - American physicist born in Germany; explained Brownian movement; published a paper that explained the photoelectric effect (1905) which provided the foundation for quantum theory and resulted in the invention of the photoelectric cell; published his general theory of relativity (1915) which contained a new description of gravity; received the Nobel Prize for physics for his work in quantum physics (1921).

1879-1968

Otto Hahn - German chemist-physicist; shared the 1944 Nobel Prize with Fritz Strassmann in chemistry for their discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei (first to recognize nucleur fission). He began his research work in radiochemistry in Sir William Ramsay's laboratory at University College, London, 1904. There, in the process of extracting radium from a sample of barium salt, Hahn discovered radiothorium. He obtained a research position at McGill University with Sir Ernest Rutherford, and in 1905 he again exhibited his talent for discovery by finding radioactinium.

Returning to Germany in 1906, Hahn was appointed professor at the University of Berlin in 1910. After he was named (1912) head of the radioactivity department at the Kaiser Wilhelm (later Max Planck) Institute, Hahn and Lise Meitner, his collaborator of 30 years who joined him in 1907, discovered more radioelements. In 1917 they discovered the most stable isotope of element 91 (protactinium), the substance that helped resolve the complex actinium series. Hahn then became involved in the identification of artifical radioactive materials and their decay patterns. In collaboration with Fritz Strassmann, Hahn discovered (1938) that the transformation of uranium (element 91) artificially induced by neutron bombardment produced barium (element 56). Because barium is far removed from the original parent element, this discovery was considered at the time contrary to all theoretical expectations. This phenomenon, known as fission, led directly to the development of the atomic bomb.

1881-1955

Alexander Fleming - Scottish bacteriologist; isolated lysozyme from tears (1922); observed a mold, he named penicillin, that prevented bacterial growth.

1881-1957

Irving Langmuir - American chemist; improved incandescent lamp (1913); received Nobel Prize for chemistry (1932) for his study of monomolecular films; experimented with cloud-seeding (1950); helped refine theory of chemical bonding.

1882-1945

Johannes Hans Wilhelm Geiger - German physicist; occasionally collaborated with Ernest Rutherford; helped to develop first successful counter of alpha particles (1908); improved design of this instrument became known as the Geiger counter (1928).

1882-1970

Max Born - German physicist; received the Nobel Prize for physics for his work in quantum mechanics (1954).

1884-1949

Friedrich Karl Rudolf Bergius

1884-1971

Theodor Svedberg - Swedish colloid chemist.

1885-1962

Niels Henrik David Bohr - Danish physicist; his model of atomic structure proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus in fixed orbits that are discrete energy states; received the Nobel Prize for physics for his work in atomic structure and radiation (1922).

1886-1950

Arthur Jeffrey Dempster

1886-1956

Clarence Birdseye - American inventor and businessman; developed method for preserving foods by quick-freezing (1916-1928); formed General Foods Company (1924).

1886-1975

Robert Robinson

1887-1915

Henry Gwyn-Jeffreys Moseley - English physicist; discovered Moseley's law of characteristic x-ray spectra of elements (1913); demonstrated that the number of electrons in an element is the same as the atomic number, establishing the significance of the atomic number.

1887-1961

Erwin Schroedinger - Austrian physicist; developed atomic theory of wave mechanics (1926); shared Nobel Prize for physics with P.A.M.Dirac (1933).

1888-1970

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman - Indian physicist; developed a spectroscopic technique named after him (1928); the scattering effect of light that a compound causes during Raman spectroscopy gives information about its molecular structure; received Nobel Prize for physics (1930).

1888-1973

Selman A Waksman - American; soil bacteriologist; Professor of microbiology.

1889-1944

Thomas Midgley Jr.

1890-1984

John Rock - American obstetrician-gynecologist; performed first successful in vitro fertilization of a human ovum (1944).

1891-1957

Walther Wilhelm Bothe - German physicist, received the 1954 Nobel Prize for physics for developing and applying the coincidence method. Using this method, Bothe and Hans Geiger demonstrated (1924) that the conservation of momentum and energy is valid in certain elementary processes and discredited the hypothesis that these physical properties are conserved only statistically. In 1929, Bothe and Werner Kolhorster demonstrated the existence of high-energy particles in cosmic radiation, and the following year Bothe, with H. Becker, detected a new radiation, which James Chadwick identified as the neutron. Bothe taught physics in Berlin and Giessen and directed the Max Planck Institute at Heidelberg, Germany, from 1934 until his death. (January 8, 1891 - February 8, 1957)

1891-1974

Sir James Chadwick - English physicist; discovered the neutron; received the Nobel Prize for physics for this discovery (1935).

1892-1958

Louis-Victor de Broglie - French physicist; demonstrated mathematically that electrons and other subatomic particles exhibit wavelike properties (1927); this particle-wave duality was derived from the work of Albert Einstein and Max Planck; received Nobel Prize for physics (1929).

1892-1962

Arthur Holly Compton - American physicist; discovered the Compton Effect, which showed that a proton has momentum. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics jointly with C.T.R. Wilson (1927).

1892-

Dmitri Vladimirovich Skobeltsyn - Russian physicist; obtained the first cloud-chamber photographs of cosmic rays. These showed that the rays either were, or produced,  many charged, high energy particles.

1893-

Christopher Ingold

1893-1981

Harlold Clayton Urey - was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize for chemistry for the discovery and isolation of deuterium (heavy hydrogen). Because of this recognition as a Nobel laureate and his experience in isotope separation, Urey was brought into the wartime Manhattan Project as head of the gaseous-diffusion project for uranium separation. Soon after the war he began to speak out against the misuse of nuclear energy. His later research involved such diverse fields as geochemistry, astrophysics, and the origin of life.

1894-1970

Marietta Blau - Austrian physicist; was the first to use nuclear track plates.

1895-1964

Gerhard Domagk

1895-1982

William Francis Giauque - American physical chemisty; did significant work in chemical thermodynamics, particularly on the behavior of substances at very low temperatures, for which he was awared the 1949 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Giauque determined accurately the entropy of a large number of substances near absolute zero, and he proved that the third law of thermodynamics, which states that at absolute zero a perfect crystal has a zero entropy, was a fundamental law of nature. He also discovered how a strong magnet could be used to produce temperature very close to absolute zero.

1896-1937

Wallace Hume Carothers

1896-1957

Gerty Cori - American biochemist born in Czechoslovakia.

1897-1956

Irene Joliot-Curie - French physicist; daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie; discovered artificial radioactivity along with husband Frederic Joliet-Curie.

1897-1967

John Douglas Cockcroft - English physicist known for his early work with Ernest Walton on atomic particle accelerators, for which they received the 1951 Nobel Prize for physics. A graduate of Cambridge University (1934), Cockcroft served as professor of natural philosophy at Cambridge (1934-1946), director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (1946), and president of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. In 1932, Cockcroft and Walton achieved the first successful disintegration of atomic nuclei by artificial means. Using a voltage multiplier to generate 150,000 volts of electricity, they bombarded lithium atoms with accelerated protons to produce beryllium. The beryllium immediately split into two alpha particles, which were identified by bright scintillations on a zinc-sulfide screen and by the density of their tracks.

1897-1974

Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett - English physicist; obtained the first cloud-chamber tracks of the induced transmutation of nitrogen and of other elements, and late made many cosmic-ray studies. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics (1948).

1898-1941

Rudolf Schoenheimer

1898-1968

Sir Howard Walter Florey, Baron Florey - British pathologist and codiscoverer of penicillin. Born in Adelaide, Australia, and educated in medicine at the University of Adelaide, he later studied and taught in England. In 1935 he was appointed director of the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford. Florey studied naturally occurring antibacterials, of which the Penicillum mold discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming seemed the most promising. In 1939 Florey and the German-British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain isolated the active agent, penicillin, from a fraction of the mold and formulated procedures for extraction and production. With British industries affected by World War II, Florey took his process to the United States, where private and government laboratories produced sufficient quantities to combat bacterial infection in wounded soldiers. For his work he was knighted in 1944, shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine n 1945 with Chain and Fleming and was elected president of the Royal Society in 1960.

1898-1973

Karl Ziegler - German chemist; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1963) for their discoveries in the field of the chemistry and technology of high polymers.

1898-

Isidor Isaac Rabi - Austrian, American physicist; made prescise determinations of nuclear magnetic moments in beams of atoms by his radio frequency resonance method. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics (1944).

1899-1975

Percy Lavon Julian - American chemist; researched the Calabar bean plant; successfully synthesized physostigmine, which was used to treat glaucoma (1935).

1899-1998

Thomas Hope Johnson - American physicist; in 1931 he obtained crystal deffraction of a beam of hydrogen atoms. In 1933 Johnson and Jabez Curry Street (1906-1989) observed that the cosmic-ray intensity from the west exceeded that from the east. This east-west asymmetry shows that there is an excess of positively charged particles in the primary cosmic-ray beam.

1900-1958

Frederic Joliot-Curie - French nuclear physicist; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1935) in recognition of the synthesis of new radioactive elements.

1900-1958

Wolfgang Pauli   - Austrian theoretical physicist; one of the founders of modern physics. He is most famous for his "Pauli exclusion principle." which states that no two electrons in an atom can have the same four quantum numbers. For his work in this area he was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for physics.

While an undergraduate student in physics at Munich, Pauli wrote a comprehensive article on the theory of relativity that became the classic treatment of the subject. In 1924 he proposed a new quantum number (related to spin) for electrons, and the following year he enunciated the exclusion principle. In 1928, Pauli was named professor of theoretical physics at the Zurich Technical University, where, in 1931, he predicted that conservation laws demanded the existence of the neutrino, a particle later found. After being at Princton University during World War II, Pauli became a U.S. citizen, but he spent his last years in Zurich.

1900-1965

Paul Muller - Swiss chemist; discovered that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT, a known synthetic chemical substance, was useful as an insecticide (1939).

1900-1967

Richard Kuhn - Swiss chemist; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1938) for his work on carotenoids and vitamins. (Caused by the authorities of his country to decline the award but later received the diploma and the medal.)

1901-1954

Enrico Fermi - American physicist born in Rome; researched the transmutation of elements through neutron bombardment; his team produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago; received the Nobel Prize for physics for the development of neutron-induced nuclear reactions (1938).

1901-1958

Ernest Orlando Lawrence - American physicist; received Nobel Prize for physics for the invention and development of the cyclotron "atom smasher" (1939).

1901-1967

Robert Jemison Van De Graaff - American physicist; constructed the first reliable, high voltage, electrostatic generator for nuclear research - "Van De Graaff Generator".

1901-1976

Werner Karl Heisenberg - German physicist; published the first theory of quantum mechanics (1925); postulated the "uncertainty principle (1927); received Nobel Prize for physics (1932).

1901-1978

Vincent du Vigneaud - American chemist; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1955) for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone.

1901-1982

Rene Jules Dubos - American bacteriologist born in France.

1901-1994

Linus Carl Pauling - American biochemist; applied X-ray diffraction, electron diffraction and quantum mechanics to chemistry; developed theories of rare gas compounds; developed mechanistic theory of enzymes (1946); determined the physical structure of proteins as helical (1951); developed and applied some of the laws of structural chemistry in work with proteins; researched the structure of DNA; received Nobel Prize for chemistry(1954) for research of the nature of chemical bonds; received Nobel Prize for peace (1962) for work in banning nuclear weapons testing; received National Medal of Honor (1975); shared in the quantum mechanical development of valence and resonance theory; introduced concept of electronegativity; founded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine (1973); researched Vitamin C and nutrition.

1901-2000

Louis LePrince-Ringuet - French physicist; obtained the first cloud chamber photograph of a meson-electron collision, from which the mass of the meson could be deduced.

1902-1971

Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius -  Swedish chemist; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1948) for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis, especially for his discoveries concerning the complex nature of the serum proteins.

1902-1984

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac  - English physicist; published Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930); received Nobel Prize for physics for his research in wave mechanics (1933).

1902-1995

Eugene Paul Wigner - Hungarian physicist; published the first of a long series of important papers on the application of group theory in quantum mechanics. He was awarded the Nobel prize for physics jointly with Maria Mayer and J.H.D. Jenson (1963)

1903-1969

Cecil Frank Powell - English physicist; discovered the pi-meson. Powell was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1950.