Archimedes - Einstein

ARCHIMEDES

     Born about 287BC in Sicily. The Greatest mathematician and engineer of ancient Greece. Died 212 BC aged about 75, killed by a Roman soldier.
     Archimedes was born in the town of Syracuse in Sicily, at that time ruled by the Greeks. He was the son of an astronomer and spent his life studying geometry and using his ideas to develop new types of machines. One of the most famous is the Archimedean screw for pumping out water, though the Egyptians may have invented this.

ARISTOTLE

     Born 322 BC at Stageira in northern Greece. Philosopher, teacher and writer in ancient Greece. Died 384 BC aged 62.
     The town of Stageira where Aristotle was born was then ruled by the kings of Macedon. His father was a Doctor to the royal family. When he about 17, Aristotle travelled to Athens to join the famous Academy, a school run by the philosopher Plato. He stayed there for 20 years. Later he became a teacher himself, and also wrote books about politics and ethics, the study of whether particular things are right or wrong.

BAIRD, JOHN LOGIE

     Born 1888 in Heiensburgh, Scotland The 'father of television' Died 1946 aged 57.
     John Logic Baird was the first person to show that it was possible to transmit visual images, so his name will be a part of television's history. Baird's first jobs as an engineer was so miserable that when he was 26 he decided to go it alone and become an inventor. His early ideas flopped and by the time he was 35 he had lost all his money. But in 1923 he started work on a machine to transmit pictures, as well as sound, by radio. Soon he was able to send crude images by wireless transmitter to a receiver a few feet away. In January 1926 he gave a television demonstration to the public at Royal Institution in London. This was the very first demonstration of television.

COPERNICUS, NICOLAS

     Born 1473 in Poland. Before Copernicus's work the planet, Earth was believed to be in the centre of the Universe. He showed that the sun was in the centre, with the planets orbiting around it. Died 1543 aged 70.
     Copernicus was the son of a wealthy merchant. When he was 10 his father died and he was brought up by his uncle, a bishop in the Catholic Church. Copernicus was well educated and he considered becoming a priest, but soon changed his mind and began studying astronomy. He also studied mathematics, law and medicine, but astronomy remained his favourite subject.

CHADWICK, SIR JAMES

.      Born 1891 IN Manchester, England. His discovery of the neutron was of great importance in understanding what atoms are like. Died 1974 aged 83.
     In the 1920s a young scientist called James Chadwick went to work in Cambridge with the famous Ernest Rutherford, who had done very important work on atoms. Atoms are the tiny particles that everything is made of, but they are far too small to be seen even with most powerful microscopes. At this time many scientists were trying to find out what atoms are like.

CURIE, MARIE

     Born 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. Marie Curie with her husband Pierre did important work with radioactive substances. Died 1934 aged 66.
     Marie Curie was born Marya Sklodowska in Poland's capital. Her father taught physics and her mother was the headmistress of a girl's school. In 1894 Marie met a successful chemist called Pierre Curie,and in a year they were married. Pierre soon realized that Marie was a really great scientist and he happily worked as her assistant. In the year of their marriage Rontgen discovered X-rays, and soon afterwards the French scientist Becquerel found that substances containing uranium produced similar types of rays.
     Marie Curie was to spend her whole life studying these radioactive substances. She invented an instrument to measure radioactivity, and found that a substance called pitchblende ( the ore from which uranium is extracted) was a thousand time more radio active than the uranium itself. But what was making the pitchblende so radioactive?
     Marie and Pierre arranged for tonnes and tonnes of pitchblende to be sent to Paris from a mine in Austria. They worked non-stop in a unheated, damp shed, trying to separate out the tiny quantity of unknown radioactive material. After several years work they ended up with the pinch of highly radio active element, which they called radium. They received a Noble prize for this work.
     Sadly, in 1906 Pierre was killed when he carelessly crossed a road in front of a Horse-drawn cart. Marie carried on with her work and received a second Noble prize in 1911.
     The dangers of radioactivity were not properly understood at that time, and Marie Curie suffered throughout her life from radiation burns on her skin and eventually died from a type of cancer called leukaemia .

DALTON, JOHN

     Born 1766 in Eaglesfield. Cumbria, England. His ideas about atoms changed the way scientists think. Died 1844, aged 77.
     When John was only 10 he went to work for a man called Elihu who was very interested in science. Elihu soon realized that John was very bright and started to teach him mathematics. He did so well that when he was only 12 he became the head of a small country school. He used to teach children of all ages with the tiny ones sitting on his knee to learn to read. Later John Dalton became a lecturer at New College in Manchester and later still went to London to lecture at the Royal Institution.

EDISON, THOMAS ALVA

     Born 1847 in Ohio, USA. One of the greatest inventors of all time. Of his thousands of inventions the Phonograph and the electric lamp are the best known. Died 1931 aged 84.
     When Thomas was only 7 he was expelled from his school because the headmaster thought he was too slow to learn. But his mother taught him at home and encouraged his interest in science. By the time he was 10 he had made his own laboratory. At the age of 12 he began to sell newspapers and sweets in the carriages of the new railway trains. He set up a laboratory in the luggage van so that he could do experiments while the train was in the station.
     Edison set up his own company, which he called his 'invention factory', and he used to boast that they made a small invention every ten days and a big one every six months. All the inventions were patented, but his greatest invention was the world's first machine for recording sounds, the phonograph,. The whole of our modern recording industry, for both pop and classical music, really developed from this invention.
     Edison also invented the electric lamp. It consisted of a wire inside a glass bulb from which all the air had been taken out to create a vacuum. When an electric current was passed through the wire, called a filament, it glowed white hot and so gave out light. While he was experimenting Edison found that a current could also flow across the vacuum to a plate inside the bulb. He did not understand why, but this fact, that we now know to be due to electrons escaping from the filament, is named after him, the Edison effect. This discovery led to the invention of electronic valves and was really the beginning of the whole of our modern electronics industry.

EINSTEIN, ALBERT

     Born 1879 in Wuttemberg, Germany. One of the world's greatest physicists, who was also deeply concerned about world peace. Died 1955 aged 76.
     As a boy Albert was very unhappy at school, and the schoolmaster treated him badly because they thought he was not very clever. At 15 he had very bad results in many of his school subjects but was good at music, and especially at playing the violin. After spending some time in Italy he eventually went to Zurich in Switzerland, and there his skill as a scientist was recognised.
     In one year, when he was only 26, he published several scientific papers that completely changed the way scientists think. He became a Swiss citizen and began to work in the Patent Office, examining applications made by other people. When World War I ended in 1918 he hoped that would be the end of the army's power. Unfortunately he was. In 1921 he was awarded the top prize in science, the Nobel Prize. It is typical of his modesty that he travelled third class with his violin under his arm when he went to Stockholm to receive the prize!
     Not many people really deserve the title 'genius' but Einstein must be one of them. Nearly all branches of physics were changed by his theories, and without them lasers, television, computers, space travel and many other things that are familiar today would never have developed.

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