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!
