Linnaeus and the System of Binomial Nomenclature
Every described organism carries a scientific name made of two words: a genus followed by a species epithet, such as Quercus robur or Mycobacterium…
28 min read
Category
History
Essays on past societies, institutions and turning points, from the House of Wisdom in Baghdad to the founding of the Royal Society. Many essays in the science sections also carry History as a second section.
Harrison’s Marine Chronometer and the Longitude Problem
For most of the history of ocean navigation, sailors out of sight of land could find their latitude, their distance north or south of…
23 min read
Mendel and the Laws of Inheritance
In February and March 1865 Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar at the monastery of St Thomas in Brno, read a paper in two parts…
23 min read
Hertz, Marconi and the Invention of Radio
Between 1886 and 1888, in a lecture room at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, the physicist Heinrich Hertz made electric sparks jump across a…
23 min read
Pasteur, Koch and the Germ Theory of Disease
For most of recorded history the great epidemic diseases were explained by bad air, by an imbalance of the body’s humours, or by the…
25 min read
Faraday and Electromagnetic Induction
On 29 August 1831, in the basement laboratory of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, London, Michael Faraday wound two separate coils of insulated…
25 min read
The Steam Engine
In the summer of 1712, in a brick engine house beside the coalfield at Tipton, a machine rather smaller than a ship’s capstan began…
35 min read
The Sherborne Turing Project
There is a particular kind of irony that only English school histories produce. The school that taught Alan Turing the beginnings of modern computing…
48 min read
The Discovery of the Electron
On the evening of 30 September 1897, in a lecture theatre at the Royal Institution in London, a thin beam of light inside a…
25 min read
The Technion
On the pine-covered north-eastern slopes of Mount Carmel, above the port of Haifa, the Technion has spent a century turning students into engineers. It…
39 min read
The Discovery of Anaesthesia
For most of the history of surgery the binding constraint on an operation was not the surgeon’s skill but the patient’s tolerance of pain,…
25 min read
The Technocracy Movement
On the evening of 13 January 1933, in a ballroom high above Fifth Avenue in New York, a man in a well-tailored double-breasted suit…
24 min read
The Metric System and the French Revolution
Take a market square in a French provincial town in the spring of 1796, and put a cloth seller beside a farmer with a…
28 min read
The Triumph and Tragedy of Antoine Lavoisier
On 8 May 1794, in a courtyard of the old priory in Paris that had been renamed the Prison Saint-Lazare, a man of fifty…
29 min read
The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary France
On the morning of 8 May 1794 a wagon drew up at the Place de la Revolution in Paris, and among the prisoners taken…
29 min read
The Metre and the Meridian
On the first of August 1793 the National Convention voted to abolish every French unit of length and replace the lot with a single…
26 min read
The Weizmann Institute and the Founding of Israeli Science
In the late summer of 1934, on a tract of citrus and sandy soil south of the little town of Rehovot, the first building…
27 min read
The Discovery of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming
The first antibiotic to be discovered and put into routine medical use was the product of an accident in a London bacteriology laboratory in…
22 min read
The Polio Vaccine Story and the March of Dimes
Few twentieth-century diseases cast as long and as clinical a shadow over ordinary childhood as poliomyelitis. Summer after summer, parents watched their children for…
24 min read
The Curies and the Discovery of Radioactivity
In November of 1895, a German physicist named Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, working alone in his laboratory at the University of Wurzburg with a Crookes…
23 min read
Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis and the Theory of Special Relativity
The Patent Office in Bern, 1905 Albert Einstein was twenty-six years old in 1905. He had been born in Ulm in the Kingdom of…
15 min read
Mendeleev and the Periodic Table
In February 1869 a chemistry professor in St Petersburg, trying to decide the order of chapters in a textbook, arranged the 63 elements then…
23 min read
The Apollo Program and the Moon Landing
On the morning of 16 July 1969, at 9:32 AM local time, three men in the white coveralls of the National Aeronautics and Space…
24 min read
The Manhattan Project and the Trinity Test
At 5:29:45 in the morning of July 16, 1945, in a remote stretch of the New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto,…
23 min read