Did you know that another scientist came up with the theory of evolution-by-natural-selection
at the exact same time as Charles Darwin? Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of
Mental Floss.com. Alfred Russel Wallace was a naturalist who had also studied how plants
and animals adapted to their environment so only the fittest survived. While he was in
southeast Asia recovering from a bad case of malaria, he sent a letter to Darwin outlining
his idea. It spurred Darwin to action. In 1858 both of them had papers on the subject
presented before the Linnean Society of London. Then Darwin published On the Origin of Species
in 1859, and everybody forgot about Wallace.
But not us! Alfred Russel Wallace is just the first of many unsung scientists, from
under-appreciated geologists to the first woman to fly in space, that I’m going to
share with you today.
There’s a long tradition of scientists elbowing aside their colleagues when it comes to winning
awards, especially for the Nobel Prize. Shortly before World War II, Austrian physicist Lise
Meitner collaborated with German chemist Otto Hahn to demonstrate nuclear fission. That’s
when a heavy nucleus of a material, such as uranium, is split into two lighter nuclei,
releasing a massive amount of energy. The discovery launched the Atomic Age. But Meitner,
who was Jewish, had to flee to Sweden when Germany invaded Austria in 1938. As the years
went on, Hahn downplayed Meitner’s involvement in their work, and when he won the Nobel Prize
in the mid-40s, Meitner’s contributions went unacknowledged.
Thanks to Ozzle and Rasgonras for writing about Meitner in the YouTube comments. We
got a ton of other great suggestions, too—we might have to make a list of more under-appreciated
scientists later this year. If you want to be featured in our next List Show, drop your
favorite fact about millennials down below. The generation everyone loves to hate will
be the subject of our next episode.
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist who specialized in taking photos that could show
the molecular structure of various compounds. With this method, her lab photographed DNA,
which would be critical for the discovery of its double-helix structure. Three other
people—James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins—used Franklin’s findings
without her permission. When they won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for their collective
work in 1962, Franklin was left out of the honors—she had died in 1958.
Another physicist who should have gotten more acknowledgment is Chien-Shiung Wu. She worked
on the Manhattan Project, the United States’s secret effort to build nuclear weapons. While
the moral implications of the work are debatable, it’s a fact that the world’s leading physicists
(not including Lise Meitner) were involved in its scientific research. Later, Wu designed
experiments that disproved a law of physics: the Conservation of Parity. Essentially, parity
means that particles that are mirror images of each other will also behave as mirror images.
Wu designed an experiment that showed the mirror-image particles don’t necessarily
act that way, which contributed to the development of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
But—and you probably saw this coming—her colleagues in the work won the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1957. Wu did not.
Physicists aren’t the only scientists whose contributions can be overlooked. Alice Augusta
Ball was a brilliant chemist at what’s now the University of Hawaii. Around 1915, she
developed a method to make a new, injectable treatment for leprosy. Her invention saved
thousands of patients. Tragically, she died when she was just 24—and worse, the president
of the university later published a paper taking all the credit for her work! Fortunately,
a physician named Harry T. Hollmann set the record straight in a 1922 journal article.
He called her discovery “Ball’s method,” thereby recognizing her contribution to medicine.
Some scientists lived in the wrong time for society to appreciate their talents. Mary
Anning, born in 1799, was a British fossil-collector who unearthed some of the most important fossils
in history, like the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur. She pioneered the field
of paleontology and upended ideas about how life developed on Earth. But as a self-educated
woman, she struggled to make ends meet. Today, the part of southwest England that she made
famous as a fossil hotspot—the Jurassic Coast—is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's
also home to List Show audience member Emma Park, who sung Anning's praises in the comments
of our episode about fossils! Thanks, Emma!
As a child, Vera Rubin watched the stars outside her bedroom window and mapped their movement
across the night sky. Her hobby grew into a desire to pursue a career in astronomy.
In the 1940s, she applied to Princeton but was told that its astronomy program didn’t
accept women. It wouldn’t even send her a course catalog. Rubin earned her degrees
elsewhere and eventually embarked on her most important project: discovering why stars on
the edge of spiral galaxies spin as fast as those at the center, where gravity is stronger.
This observation confounded expectations: the visible mass of such galaxies indicated
that they should be unable to keep such fast-moving, distant stars in orbit. After years of observations,
it was concluded that the universe must be made chiefly of dark matter whose mass, essentially,
holds space together. To honor her groundbreaking find, the National Science Foundation announced
this year that its newest telescope will be named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Charles Drew fought against segregation while developing life-saving technology. The innovative
African American medical researcher discovered new techniques for preserving and storing
blood plasma, and launched a huge network of blood donations to help soldiers on the
battlefield during World War II. He even created the system of bloodmobiles we continue to
use today. Drew resigned from the armed services in protest, however, when the military insisted
on keeping blood donated by African Americans separate from that of whites. Drew argued,
quote, “(1) no official department of the Federal Government should willfully humiliate
its citizens; (2) there is no scientific basis for the order; (3) they need the blood.”
A lot of scientists lived in exactly the right point in history for their special talents—but
that point was a long, long time ago, and well, memories fade. Like Francis Beaufort.
When he was the commander of a British naval ship, around 1805, he devised a scale for
categorizing wind speeds so sailors could accurately record weather conditions. The
“Beaufort scale” goes from zero, indicating calm, to 12, meaning hurricane force. It’s
still used today to describe wind strength.
And speaking of weather, Luke Howard was an early British meteorologist who came up with
a naming system for clouds in 1803. He coined the terms cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, which
help us describe the appearance of various clouds. His writings may well have inspired
a series of cloud paintings by artist John Constable and poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Fun fact: After Percy drowned in a storm, his wife Mary Shelley kept his heart in a
jar for the rest of her life. There’s actually a long-running theory that Shelley actually
kept her deceased husband’s liver, thinking it was his heart, but we’ll have to save
that story for our video on 30 disputed body parts of dead historical figures. Which I
originally wrote as a joke, and am now thinking we might have to actually make…
A name you might have heard, but not know the story behind, is Humboldt. In the early
19th century, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored vast stretches of South
America and attempted to summit Ecuador’s highest peak, Mount Chimborazo. On his adventure,
he developed a theory of nature as an interconnected web, with forces in one part of the world
having effects in others. His bestselling books made him a global scientific celebrity,
honored everywhere he went. Plants, animals, geographical landmarks, cultural institutions,
towns, and even asteroids were named after him. Humboldt’s philosophy also influenced
important thinkers, including painter Frederic Edwin Church.
And about those forces of nature: Until Scottish geologist James Hutton came around, most Europeans
believed Earth had been shaped by a single biblical flood a few thousand years ago. Hutton
attended the University of Edinburgh before moving to his family farm outside the city.
There, as he worked in the fields, he observed how wind and rain shaped the landscape. Eventually,
he developed his key idea: That Earth’s rocks, mountains, and canyons had been formed
by continuous upheaval and erosion over millions of years, a theory called gradualism. In announcing
his findings, Hutton debunked existing ideas about the planet’s age and systems, which
didn’t make him very popular in the late 18th century. Hutton isn’t a household name
today, but the evidence, of course, eventually proved his theory correct.
Charles Henry Turner was a behavioral scientist who published more than 70 papers in the emerging
field of insect behavior despite a lack of funding and lab access in the early 20th century.
Among his findings, Turner discovered that honeybees can see color and patterns, insects
can hear, and roaches can learn from experience and change their behavior. Good news!
Another scientist who definitely needs more recognition is Mary Golda Ross, thought to
be the first Native American aerospace engineer. She credited the Cherokee tradition of educating
boys and girls equally as her launchpad in life. Ross worked for Lockheed’s top-secret
think tank—the only woman and only Native person there—and designed concepts for interplanetary
spacecraft, Earth orbiters, satellites, and rockets at the dawn of the Space Age. Most
of her work is still classified. And as if that isn’t cool enough, Ross co-authored
the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III, the official guidebook to space; she even
crafted potential missions to Mars and Venus.
And you might not know Eunice Foote, but this amateur climatologist developed an experiment
in the 1850s demonstrating that water vapor and carbon dioxide influence the effect of
solar heat. Observing cylinders under sunlight, she found that a cylinder filled with carbon
dioxide got hotter than a control cylinder and took longer to cool down. This wasn’t
*exactly* a demonstration of the greenhouse effect, as is sometimes suggested, but her
experiments did foreshadow further study of how CO2 can heat Earth’s atmosphere with
dire consequences.
Augustin-Jean Fresnel also worked with sunlight, but with totally different instruments. Fresnel
was an engineer who specialized in optics, or the study of light and its properties.
While working for France’s Lighthouse Commission, Fresnel designed more effective, beehive-shaped
lenses for lighthouse lamps. Comprised of circular glass prisms, the lenses concentrated
the brightness of the light source into a beam, making the warning beacons visible far
out to sea. His invention saved countless sailors’ lives, and continues to be used
in numerous applications today, from traffic lights to overhead projectors to telephoto
camera lenses. ...Does anyone still use overhead projectors?
Benjamin Banneker also put complicated science into practical use. It’s worth pointing
out that verifiable details about Banneker’s life and work are hard to come by. Given his
unique place in America’s history, though, and specifically African-American history,
we wanted to mention him. Born in 1731 near Baltimore, Maryland, he helped survey the
land that would become Washington, D.C. The multitalented astronomer and naturalist translated
his meteorological observations into a series of almanacs, leading citizens to praise not
only his scientific work, but also his advocacy of the abolition of slavery.
We’ll wrap up our list of unsung scientists with two more women who looked up to the heavens.
Caroline Herschel was only four-foot-three, but she was a giant among astronomers in the
18th century. While her brother William discovered the planet Uranus (it was previously believed
to be a star), Caroline discovered her first comet in 1786. She eventually found seven
more, as well as numerous nebulae and star clusters. She also published a massive catalogue
of stars that convinced the leading astronomy societies to admit her as an honorary member.
Finally, we come to the first woman to actually *go* to space. Before being chosen for the
Soviet space program, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s main interest was parachuting.
Those skills paved the way for her rigorous training for space flight and her solo mission
in 1963 aboard Vostok 6. In her 70-hour, 50-minute flight, she made over 40 trips around our
planet. She then parachuted safely down to Earth.
Don’t forget to subscribe to Mental Floss, and leave your favorite fact about millennials
in the comments below. That episode will be up on March 18th.
Also, I would love it if you could wish my favorite millennial, my little brother, a happy birthday.
Happy Birthday, Dave!