The Scientist Behind It

The humans behind the breakthroughs — eccentric, stubborn, brilliant, and often wrong.

39 stories

• The Archaeologist Who Measured the Great Pyramid in Pink Underwear — and Buried His Father's Favorite Theory
• The Backyard Dish the Neighbors Thought Could Control the Weather — and the Man Who Used It to Hear the Milky Way
• The Chemist Who Caught His Landlady Recycling Dinner With a Pinch of Radioactivity
• The Chemist Who Got Parliament to Make Gold-Making Legal Again
• The Computer Pioneer Who Declared War on London's Organ Grinders
• The Efficiency Expert Who Tried Shaving With Two Razors at Once — and Lost the Time Bandaging His Throat
• The Man Who Strung Eight Miles of Telegraph Wire Around His Garden — and Was Told It Was 'Wholly Unnecessary'
• The Naturalist Who Rode a Caiman — Then Went Home and Built the World's First Nature Reserve
• The Country Surgeon Who Took Out His Own Appendix to Prove a Point — and Fixed His Own Hernia at 70
• The Surgeon Who Unrolled Mummies for Sold-Out Crowds — and the Duke Who Hired Him to Make One More
• The Newspaper That Took 49 Years to Admit Rockets Work in Space
• The Physicist Who Cleaned His 40-Foot Spectrograph by Sending the Family Cat Through It
• The Scientists Who Sat in a Room Hot Enough to Cook a Steak — and Walked Out Fine
• The Priest Who Put Tiny Taffeta Pants on Frogs to Find Out Where Babies Come From
• The Trumpeters Who Rode a Steam Train Back and Forth to Test a Theory About Stars
• The Engineer Who Built a Flip Table to Shake a Gold Coin Out of His Own Windpipe
• The Doctor Who Rode a Rocket Sled at 632 MPH — and Gave Us Murphy's Law
• The King Found Six Hours Into the Dig, Under a Parking Space Marked 'R'
• The Needle Isaac Newton Slid Behind His Own Eyeball to Find Out Where Color Comes From
• The Three Safes of Atomic Secrets That All Opened With the Same Number
• The Abbé Who Shocked 200 Monks in a Line a Mile Long to Time the Speed of Electricity
• The Doctor Who Ate, Slept, and Worked on a Giant Scale for 30 Years
• The Moon Rocket Struck by Lightning Twice — and the Switch Nobody in Mission Control Had Heard Of
• The Obituary That Supposedly Created the Nobel Prize — and That Nobody Has Ever Found
• The Physicist Who Levitated a Frog — and Then Won a Real Nobel Prize
• The Man Who Found Troy — and Dug Straight Through It
• The Geologist Who Tried to Eat His Way Through the Entire Animal Kingdom
• The Scientist Who Weighed the Earth but Couldn't Speak to His Housekeeper
• Nikola Tesla and the Pigeon He Loved
• The 100-Hour X-Ray Photograph That Revealed the Shape of DNA
• The Alchemist Who Boiled Urine Looking for Gold and Found Phosphorus
• The Astronomer With a Metal Nose and a Beer-Drinking Elk
• The Chemist Who Fed the World and Gassed the Trenches
• The Circus Strongman Who Found Egypt's Greatest Tomb
• The Corn Geneticist Who Saw Genes Jump — And Waited 32 Years to Be Believed
• The Doctor Who Discovered Handwashing — and Was Locked Away for It
• The Farm Boy Who Discovered Pluto — and Now Sails Past It Forever
• The Graduate Student, the 'Little Green Men,' and the Nobel That Got Away
• The Movie Star Who Patented a Secret Weapon the Navy Rejected

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