1-2010 Top Ten Fairly Unknown Scientists and Academia

8/14/2019 1-2010 Top Ten Fairly Unknown Scientists and Academia

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Kanook Tlingit NationJanuary 2010

I have constructed a list of scientists/academies that I have heard little about, in

detailing their contribution to our environment on this Blue Marble some you will

recognize, other names will zip over your head. I composed this list for my benefit and

have decided to share my surprise in finding exactly what their contributions have been.

Some outstanding items from between their ears are good things while others did nothing

to benefit mankind. I leave their classification of importance to you, beginning with the

10th in the order as I perceived them.

April 5th,1827 February 10th, 191285.85 Years Old The Father of Antiseptic Medicine

Listed in our historical records as a pioneer in antiseptic surgery, as an English surgeon

working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in 1867 he noted the high mortality rate (45-50%)

of all his amputation cases, all from serious infections from the wounds. He was familiar

with the work of Louis Pasteur and studied the papers dealing with carbolic acid, at a

point in time he forced his surgeons to savagely wash their hands in carbolic acid before

and after each operation, also cleaning their tools with it and treating his patients wounds.

He came from a prosperous Quaker home in Upton, Essex and was the son of Joseph

Jackson Lister, the pioneer of the compound microscope he was fluent in French and

German, his higher education was through the University of London (one of few that wouldadmit Quakers) and graduated with honors as Bachelor of Medicine and entered the Royal

College of Surgeons at the ripe old age of 25. In 1854 he was the 1st assistant and friend

of James Syme at the University of Edinburgh, in time he left the Quakers and joined the

Scottish Episcopal Church and eventually married Symes daughter Agnes, she became his

lifelong partner in his medical research.


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May 23rd, 1908 January 30th, 1991

82.7 Years Old Discover of Superconductivity Winner of Nobel Prize in

Physics Twice

He was an American Physicist and Electrical Engineer, who with William Shockley andWalter Brattain won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, and

again in 1972 with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for the fundamental theory

of conventional superconductivity (BCS) theory.

He was born in Madison, Wisconsin to Dr Charles Russell Bardeen and Althea Harmer

Bardeen, and was one of five children. His father was a Professor of Anatomy and the 1st

Dean of the Medical School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison his mother was very

active figure in the world of art. He received his B.S.E.E. in 1928 from the same

University, having to take a year off for work during his studies taking a total of five years

which allowed him to complete his Masters thesis, supervised by Leo J Peters he obtained

his M.S.E.E. in 1929 from Wisconsin, his studies were influenced by Warren Weaver,

Edward Van Vleck, John Hasbrouck van Vleck and the likes of Paul Dirac, Werner

Heisenberg and Arnold Sommerfeld.

His first position in the commercial world was with Gulf Research Laboratories, Gulf Oil

based in Pittsburg from 1930-1933, was bored to death and left for a graduate program at

Princeton University and ended up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics

under Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner, in the meantime before completing his

thesis he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard

University in 1935 where he spend three years 1935-1938 working with another Nobel

Laureate physicist John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Bridgman on problems dealing with the

cohesion and electrical conduction in metals he did receive his PH.D in mathematical

physics from Princeton in 1936.At the ripe old age of 30.15 years on July 18th, 1938 he married Jane Maxell who he met

during a visit to his old friends in Pittsburgh, they remained married until the day of his

death and had two sons, James and William and on daughter Elizabeth Bardeen Greytak

and six grandchildren. His wife Jane followed him in 1997.

Albeit he was part of a three man team at Bell Labs in the invention of the transistor,

Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen, in public Shockley took the lions share of the credit in


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doing so destroyed the relationship between him and Brattain and Bardeen who refused to

work with him from then on out. All three received the Pulitzer.

He left Bell Labs and was hired by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1951

for $10,000 per year, where he was an active professor until 1975 and then became

Professor Emeritus. In 1957 in collaboration with Leon Cooper and his doctoral student

John Robert Schrieffer proposed the standard theory of superconductivity, hence its nameBSC (Bardeen, Schrieffer, Cooper) they won a Pulitzer. In 1990, Life Magazine listed

him on their list of 100 Most Influential Americans of the Century.

June 14th, 1868 June 26th, 1943

75.03 Years Old Identified agglutinins in Blood Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine

He was the child of Leopold and Fanny (Hess), whereas his father died at age 56 leaving

Karl (age 6) and his mother where the two developed a very close relationship until she

followed his father in 1908, Karl kept her death mask in his bedroom all his life. Hegraduate from a Vienna secondary school and took up studying medicine at the University

of Vienna and wrote his doctoral thesis in 1891. While still a student he published an

essay on the influence of diets on the composition of blood, and from 1891 to 1893 he

studied chemistry in Wurzburg under Hermann Emil Fishers at Munchen under Eugene

Bamberger and in Zurich under Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch during this period he wrote and

published numerous papers some in cooperation with his professors.

At the University of Vienna he became the assistant to Max von Gruber at the Hygienic

Institute, studying among other things the mechanism of immunity and the nature of

antibodies, later in 1911 he was sworn in as an associate professor of pathological

anatomy this after performing some 3,600 autopsies over a period of ten-years. Afterbeing sworn in he along with Erwin Popper indentified the infectious properties of

Poliomyelitis and isolated the poliovirus he was posthumously inducted into the Polio Hall

of Fame located at Warm Springs, Georgia in January 1958.

In 1900 he found out that the blood of two people under contact agglutinates and in

1901 he found that this effect was due to contact of blood with blood serum, as a result he

succeeded in identifying the three blood groups A, B and O, which he labeled C of human

blood in doing so he found out that blood transfusions between two persons of the same


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blood group did not lead to the destruction of blood cells. Based on his findings, in 1907

the first successful blood transfusion was done by Reuben Ottenberg at Mt Sinai Hospital

in New York City today it is common that persons with blood group AB can accept all

other blood groups, blood O can be passed to all other groups (universal donors). It was in

1930 that he was awarded his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1927 he also

identified three new blood groups M, N, and P publishing his work along with hiscollaborator Philip Levine groups that are used in paternity suits. He and Clara Nigg

between 1930-1932 cultured Rickettsia Prowazki the causative agent of typhus.

While serving at a war hospital in 1916 at the age of 48, he met and married Leopoldine

Helene Wlasto, a marriage that produced one son, Ernst Karl on April 8th, 1917 who went

on to become a surgeon in Providence, Rhode Island. Karl Landsteiner became a US

citizen in 1929, he died of a heart attack working in his laboratory, he is buried in

Nantucket, Massachusetts where he and his family spent many of their summers.

June 13th, 1831 November 5th, 1879

48.4 Years Old Developed classical Electromagnetic Theory

He is considered by many to be the 19 th-Century scientist with the greatest influence on

20th-Century physics, where his important achievement was classical electromagnetic

theory, grouping all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of

electricity, magnetism and even optics into a consistent theory. His set of equations

Maxells Equations demonstrate that electricity, magnetism and light are all

manifestations of the same phenomenon: the electromagnetic field. From that period on,

all other classic laws or equations of these disciplines became simplified cases of

Maxwells Equations.

In the end of the millennium poll, a survey of the 100 most prominent physicists votedMaxwell the 3rd greatest physicist of all time, only behind Newton and Einstein, whereas

Einstein described Maxwells work at the most profound and the most fruitful that physics

has experienced since the time of Newton, Einstein kept a photograph of Maxwell on his

study wall, alongside pictures of Michael Faraday and Newton.

He was born at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, Scotland to John Clerk Maxell and Francis

Maxell (Cay) where his father was of comfortable means being related to the Clerk family

of Penicuik, Midlothian holders of the Baronetcy of Clerk of Penicuik, his brother being the


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6th Baronet. His parents had two children their daughter Elizabeth died in infancy leaving

James, who was named after his grandfather and many of his ancestors.

During his stay at Aberdeen University (1856-1860) he studied the Rings of Saturn and

published an essay On the stability of Saturns Rings, after reading it George Biddel Airy

commented it is one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I

have ever seen., it was and is considered the final word on the issue, that is until Voyagerflew by in the 1980s, which by the way confirmed his essay in detail. In 1857 he was

befriended by the Principal of Marischal, the Reverend Daniel Dewar who introduced

Maxwell to his daughter Katherine Mary Dewar who he married on June 2nd, 1859, she was

seven years his senior little is known of his wife.

Finding himself laid off he applied for and was accepted at Kings College London (1860-

1865) during this time he produced some of his greatest works, and was awarded the

Royal Societys Rumford Medal in 1860 for his thesis on color and became a member of

the Society in 1861his papers were numerous and it was during his tenure that he

became close friends with Michael Faraday who was 40-years his senior. He died of

abdominal cancer on November 5th, 1879 and was buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle

Douglas in Galloway, Scotland.

February 11th, 1898 May 30th, 1964

66.3 Years Old Conceived the Nuclear Chain Reaction and worked on the

Manhattan Project

Born into a Jewish family of Budapest during the Austro-Hungarian Monarch before WWI,

his father a civil engineer, he attended Realiskola in his home town and in 1916 after his

graduation enrolled as an engineering student at Budapest Technical University, one year

later he drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Army as an officer-candidate and was honorably

discharged at the end of the war. Resuming engineering studies in 1919, and he along

with his family had to leave Hungary because of the increase in anti-Semitism under theHorthy regime. He continued his engineering studies at Technische Hochschule in Berlin-

Charlottenburg, soon changing his course application to physics and studied under

Einstein, Planck and Max von Laue. In 1922 he gained high-praise from Einstein for his

dissertation on thermodynamics (Uber die thermodynamicshen

Schwankungserscheinungen ). In 1927 he became a Privatdozent (instructor) in Physics at

University of Berlin and working on his own developed many technical inventions such as

his 1928 patent application on a Linear Accelerator and a 1929 application for a Cyclotron,


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and continued to work with Einstein (began in 1926) on the construction of a refrigerator

without moving parts, patent granted by US on Nov 11th, 1930. In 1933 he fled to London

to escape Nazi persecution, where he happen upon a speech given by Ernest Rutherford

that rejected the possibility of using atomic energy for practical purposes, albeit that

nuclear fission had NOT been discovered, Szilard was annoyed at this dismissal and later

when strolling to work at St Bartholomews Hospital one day he conceived of the idea ofnuclear chain reaction and the following year refined it and applied for a patent on the

concept. Later he along with Enrico Fermi applied for got a patent on the nuclear reactor.

In 1938 accepted an offer to conduct research at Columbia University in Manhattan, where

he was joined by Fermi, where they determined that Uranium would be the element of

sustaining a chain reaction. Using uranium they discovered significant neutron

multiplication during an experiment with a paper saying that it was possible to use the

process for nuclear weapons, after their first experiment he went home and wrote, That

night, there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief. Using

manufactured (under his specifications) boron-free graphite he obtained the first human-

controlled chain reaction on December 2nd, 1942.

Leo Szilard in August penned a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (32nd President USA)

explaining the possibilities of nuclear weapons, warning him that the Nazis had such a

program, he got Einstein to endorse it along with him. Because of this letter the world

entered into the atomic age and events around the world changed forever. For the rest of

his life he was sad of his involvement of nuclear development and its consequences,

especially its control by the US Military. He died in his sleep of a heart attack, and is buried

at La Jolla, California, it is said Death could only conquer him when he slept otherwise he

would have outwitted him.

December 9th, 1868 January 29th, 1934

65.14 Years Old Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1918 for Synthesizing AmmoniaHis work on synthesizing ammonia was important for fertilizers and explosives, he along

with Max Born proposed the Born-Haber cycle as a way to evaluate the lattice energy of

an ionic solid. He has also been described at the father of chemical warfare, for his work

developing and deploying chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I.

Haber was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) to Jewish parents of one of

the oldest families of the town, it is noted he later changed his faith to Christianity. His

mother died during childbirth leaving his upbringing on his fathers shoulders known as a


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well-known merchant in the town. He studied at the University of Heidelberg under Robert

Bunsen, at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University) in the group of A.W.

Hofmann, and at the Technical College of Charlottenberg (now Technical University of

Berlin) under Carl Liebermann.

He took a wife in 1901, Clara Immerwahr who gave him a son, Hermann, in 1902. When

he was with the University of Karlsruhe (1894-1911) he and Carl Bosch developed theHaber process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and

atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of low temperature and high pressure. This

process eventually labeled the Haber-Bosch process was a milestone in industrial

chemistry but in turn causing massive unemployment in Chile which up until that time was

a major producer of sodium nitrate (caliche), his process eliminated that exclusive

demand, and won him the Pulitzer. He was also active in the research of combustion

reactions, separation of gold from sea water, adsorption effects, electrochemistry, and

free radical research. From 1911 to 1933 he did a large part of his work at Kaiser Wilhelm

Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry at Berline-Dahlem (in 1953 the

institute was renamed for him).

He played a major role in the development of chemical warfare in WWI, part of his work

included the development of gas masks with absorbent filters, in addition to leading teams

for the development of chlorine gas, he was more than once on-site when the gas was

released future laureates James Franck, Gustav Hertz and Otto Hahn were part of his gas

team WWI was said to be a war of chemists which pitted Haber against another Nobel

Laureate Frenchman Victor Grignard. His wife, Clara a fellow chemist, firmly opposed his

work with poison gas and committed suicide with his service weapon in her garden a

result of his overseeing the 2nd battle of Ypres on April 22nd, 1915.

He died of heart failure on January 29 th, 1934 a man whose name today still raises

controversy because of his involvement over the development and use of poison gas in

WWI.

May 18th, 1889 November 2nd, 1944

55.46 Years Old Developed Tetra-Ethyl Lead and Chlorofluorocarbons

History demonstrates as one put it, he had more impact on the atmosphere than any

other single organism in Earths history. Like Fritz Haber his legacy is seen as far more


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mixed considering the negative impact on our environment, both the addition of lead to

our gasoline and the adding of chlorofluorocarbons to our hairspray.

Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania to an inventor father he grew up in Columbus, Ohio

and graduated from Cornell University in 1911 with a degree in mechanical engineering.

In December 1921 while working under the direction of Charles Kettering at Dayton

Research Laboratories, (sub of GM) he discovered that the addition of tetra-ethyl lead(TEL) to gasoline preventing knocking in the engine, the company dubbed the substance

Ethyl and avoided all mention of lead in reports and advertising.

In December 1922, the American Chemical Society gave him the William H Nichols

Medal, the first of several awards during his career this discovery eventually resulted in

the release of huge amounts of lead into the atmosphere causing serious health problems

around the world. Midgley himself had to take a pro-longed vacation to cure himself of

Lead Poisoning, he wrote, After about a years work in organic lead. I find that my lungs

have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh

air, January 1923. He went to Miami for convalescence.

In 1930 along with Charles Kettering, both still at GM were assigned the task of

developing a non-toxic and safe refrigerant for household appliances wala,

dichlorodifluoromethane, a chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) called Freon, for heat pumps,

refrigerators, propellants in aerosol spray cans, metered dose inhalers (asthma inhalers)

and more used the Freon he was awarded the Perkin Medal in 1937.

He went on to receive the Priestly Medal and the William Gibbs Metal, he also held two

honorary degrees and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1944 was

President and Chairman of the American Chemical Society.

In 1940 he contracted polio which left him severely disabled, whereas he devised an

elaborate systems of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bedthis system was

the eventual cause of his death when he was accidently entangled in the ropes of this

device and died of strangulation. It would be three decades after his death before theeffect of CFCs upon the ozone became widely known.

Abu Ali Sina / Ibn Sina

c. 980 1037


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Listing his two titles we do him a disservice in that he also was an astronomer, chemist,

geologist, logician, paleontologist, mathematician, physicist, poet, psychologist, scientist

and teacher. He wrote 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which approximately

240 have survived, in particular 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy,

with 40 of them on medicine. His most famous works are The Book of Healing (a vast

philosophical and scientific encyclopedia) and the The Canon of Medicine (standardmedical text at many medieval Universities) whereas it was used as text-book in the

Universities of Montpellier and Louvain as late as 1650.

He developed a medical system that combined his own personal experience with that of

Islamic Medicine, the medical system of the Greek physician Galen, Aristotelian

metaphysics, and ancient Persian, Mesopotamian and Indian medicine. He is considered a

father of modern medicine and clinical pharmacology particularly for his introduction of

systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology, along with his

discovery of the contagious nature of infectious diseases, the introduction of quarantines

to limit the spread of contagious disease, the introduction of experimental medicine,

evidence-based medicine, clinical trials, randomized controlled trails, efficacy tests,

clinical pharmacology, neuropsychiatry, risk factor analysis the idea of the syndrome and

the importance of diet and the influence of climate and environment on ones health.

He is the founder of Ayicennian Logic and the philosophical school of Avicennism, which

were influential among both Muslim and other Scholastic thinkers, he is also considered

the father of the fundamental concept of momentum in physics, and he is regarded as a

pioneer in aromatherapy for his invention of steam distillation and extraction of essential

oilshe also developed the concept of uniformitarianism and law of superposition in

geology, for which he is considered the father of geology.

Avicenna created an extensive corpus of works during Islams Golden Age, contributing

greatly to the prominence of Islamic intellectuals, as well building on Persian and Indian

mathematical systems, astronomy, algebra, trigonometry and medicine.Indeed a man of the ages!


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June 8th, 1955

54.7 Years Old (1-30-2010) Credited with Inventing the World Wide Web

On December 25th, 1990 with the assistance of Robert Cailliau and a young student at

CERN he implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and

server via the Internet. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium

(W3C), which oversees the Webs continued development, he is also the founder of the

World Wide Web Foundation, a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Foundation Chairat the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and director of

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In April 2009, he was elected as a member of the

United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington DC.

His awards and appointments throughout the technical industry are commendable and

well deserved and along with his awarded Knight Commander by Queen Elizabeth II, being

invested on July 16th, 2004 he has over his ongoing career received over twelve such

considerations in the scientific community.

Born in London, England to parents that were both mathematicians and had worked on

the Ferranti Mark I, the 1st computer to be sold commercially naturally under their

guidance his hobby was electronics when he gained entrance to Queens College at

Oxford University in 1972 he chose as his major Physics, planning to use his native talents

in both scientific theory and practical applications. It was while he was at Oxford that he

built his first computer and upon his graduation in 1976 became an independent software

consultant.

The Internet had been designed in 1973, and was up and running by 1983 as developed

by Vinton Cerf and his collaborators, whereas the Internet was basically an international

network of computers that delivered packets of information from one address to

another like e-mails. His vision was the creation of a comprehensive collection of

information in word, sound and image, each discretely identified by UDIs [Universal

Document Identifier] interconnected by hypertext links, using the Internet to provideuniversal access to the collection of information.

His vision became a reality within 2-years of his proposal, while working at CERN on a

NeTX machine, he composed his 1st server, httpd and hypertext browser/editor,

WorldWideWeb and in the summer of 1991 made the WEB available on the Internet

and the rest is recent history.


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965 (Basra, Iraq) 1039 (Cairo, Egypt)

al-Basri, Ptolemaeus Secundus or The Physicist

Ibn-al-Haytham made significant contributions to the principles of optics, along with

anatomy, astronomy, engineering, mathematics, medicine, ophthalmology, philosophy,

physics, psychology, visual perception and to science in general with his introduction of

the scientific method.

Born circa 965 in Basra, Iraq he resided mainly in Cairo, Egypt passing on to the greats

at age of 76. His over-confidence in his practical knowledge of mathematics he assumed

that he could regulated the floods of the Nile, under the sixth ruler of the Fatimid

Caliphate Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah he started his project, early on he realized the

impossibility of his claims and retired from engineering fearing for his life he feigned

madness and was placed under house-arrest, he then devoted himself to his scientific

work until his death.

His influential book Book of Optics gained him the historical title as the father of

modern optics, where he proved the intromission theory of vision and refined it into its

modern form, he is also recognized for his extensive experiments on optics, including

experiments on lenses, mirrors, refraction, reflection, laying the foundation for

microscopes, and the dispersion of light into its constituent colors. He studied binocular

vision and the Moon Illusion and described the finite speed of light, and argued that it

made of particles traveling in straight lines. In addition to his work in optics he developed

a quantitative and empirical approach to physics and science, in this light he is consideredthe pioneer of the modern scientific method and the originator of the experimental nature

of physics and science.

Author Bradley Steffens describes him as the 1st Scientist, and is considered by A.I. Sabra

as the founder of experimental psychology for his approach to visual perception and

optical illusions, and a pioneer of the philosophical field of phenomenology or the study of

consciousness from a 1st-person perspective his writing the Book of Optics has been


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ranked alongside Isaac Newtons Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica as one of

the most influential books in the history of physics, and for starting a revolution in optics

and visual perception.

Truly a man of the ages classified as the first of men mostly unknown by many!

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1-2010 Top Ten Fairly Unknown Scientists and Academia