Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution; 26 August

1743 8 May 1794;[1] French pronunciation: [twan l d lavwazje]) was a French

nobleman and chemist central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and a large influence on both
the history of chemistry and the history of biology.[2] He is widely considered in popular literature as
the "father of modern chemistry".[3] This label, however, is more a product of Lavoisier's eminent skill
as a self-promoter and underplays his dependence on the instruments, experiments, and ideas of
other chemists.[4]
It is generally accepted that Lavoisier's great accomplishments in chemistry largely stem from his
changing the science from a qualitative to a quantitative one. Lavoisier is most noted for his
discovery of the role oxygen plays in combustion. He recognized and named oxygen (1778)
and hydrogen (1783) and opposed the phlogiston theory. Lavoisier helped construct the metric
system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He
predicted the existence of silicon(1787)[5] and was also the first to establish that sulfur was an
element (1777) rather than a compound.[6] He discovered that, although matter may change its form
or shape, its mass always remains the same.

Joseph Louis Proust (September 26, 1754 July 5, 1826) was an actor an a French chemist. He
was best known for his discovery of the law of constant composition in 1799, stating that chemical
compounds always combine in constant proportions.

William Prout FRS (15 January 1785 9 April 1850) was an English chemist, physician, and natural
theologian. He is remembered today mainly for what is called Prout's hypothesis.

ir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet (17 December 1778 29 May 1829) was a Cornish chemist and
inventor.[1] He is best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth
metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature
of chlorine and iodine. Berzelius called Davy's 1806 Bakerian Lecture On Some Chemical Agencies
of Electricity[2]"one of the best memoirs which has ever enriched the theory of chemistry."[3] He was a
1st Baronet, President of the Royal Society (PRS), Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA),
and Fellow of the Geological Society (FGS).

Michael Faraday /f.rde/ FRS (22 September 1791 25 August 1867) was an
English scientist who contributed to the fields ofelectromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main
discoveries include those of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism andelectrolysis.
Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential scientists in
history. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a direct current that
Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also

established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship
between the two phenomena.[1][2] He similarly discovered the principle of electromagnetic
induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary
devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts
that electricity became practical for use in technology.
As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, investigated the clathrate hydrate of chlorine, invented
an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised
terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion. Faraday ultimately became the first and
foremost Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a lifetime position.

Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist, originally
a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, and one of the founders of the science of physical
chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel
laureate, and in 1905 became director of the Nobel Institute where he remained until his
death.[1]The Arrhenius equation, Arrhenius definition of an acid, lunar crater Arrhenius, the mountain
of Arrheniusfjellet and the Arrhenius Labs at Stockholm University are named after him. Today,
Arrhenius is best known for his study published in 1896, on the greenhouse effect.

Julius Plcker (16 June or 16 July 1801 22 May 1868) was a

German mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions to the field of analytical
geometry and was a pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that led eventually to the discovery
of the electron. He also vastly extended the study of Lam curves.

Eugen Goldstein (5 September 1850 25 December 1930) was a German physicist. He was an
early investigator of discharge tubes, the discoverer of anode rays, and is sometimes credited with
the discovery of the proton.[1]

Sir Joseph John "J. J." Thomson, OM, FRS[1] (/tmsn/; 18 December 1856 30 August 1940)
was an English physicist. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London[2] and appointed
to the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics at the Cambridge University's Cavendish
Laboratory in 1884.[3]
In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively
charged particles, which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large
value for their charge-to-mass ratio.[3] Thus he is credited with the discovery and identification of

the electron; and with the discovery of the first subatomic particle. Thomson is also credited with
finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913, as part of his
exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). His experiments to determine the
nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston, were the first use of mass
spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph.[3]
Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the electron and for his
work on the conduction of electricity in gases.[4] Seven of his students, and his son George Paget
Thomson, also became Nobel Prize winners.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (German: [h]; 22 February 1857 1 January 1894) was
a German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of electromagnetic waves theorized
by James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light. Hertz proved the theory
by engineering instruments to transmit and receive radio pulses using experimental
procedures that ruled out all other known wireless phenomena. The unit of frequency cycle per
second was named the "hertz" in his honor.[1]

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS[1] (30 August 1871 19 October
1937) was a New Zealand-born British physicist who became known as the father of nuclear
physics.[2] Encyclopdia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael
Faraday (17911867).[2]
In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the
transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta
radiation.[3] This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and
the chemistry of radioactive substances",[4] for which he remains the first Canadian and Oceanian
Nobel laureate, and the only laureate born in the South Island.
Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester (today University of Manchester)
in the UK, where he andThomas Royds proved that alpha radiation is helium nuclei.[5][6] Rutherford
performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate.[4] In 1911, although he could not
prove that it was positive or negative,[7] he theorized that atoms have their charge concentrated in a
very small nucleus,[8] and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery
and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first

"splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he
also discovered (and named) theproton.[9]

Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (30 March 1811[N1] 16 August 1899) was a German chemist.
He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860)
and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff. Bunsen developed several gas-analytical
methods, was a pioneer in photochemistry, and did early work in the field of organoarsenicchemistry.
With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on
the laboratory burners then in use. The BunsenKirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after
Bunsen and Kirchhoff.

1860 Robert Bunsen (18111899) and Gustav Kirchhoff (1824

1887) discovered two alkali metals, cesium and rubidium, with the aid of the spectroscope they
In

had invented the year before. These discoveries inaugurated a new era in the means used to find new
elements. The first 50 elements discoveredbeyond those known since ancient timeswere either the
products of chemical reactions or were released by electrolysis. From 1860 the search was on for trace
elements detectable only with the help of specialized instruments like the spectroscope.
Bunsen, the son of a professor of modern languages at Gttingen University in Germany, earned his
doctorate from that university in 1830. He was then given a three-year travel grant that took him to
factories, places of geologic interest, and famous laboratories, including Joseph Louis Gay-Lussacs in
Paris. Early in his career he did research in organic chemistry, which cost him the use of his right eye
when an arsenic compound, cacodyl cyanide, exploded. Throughout his career he remained deeply
interested in geological topics and once made daring temperature measurements of the water in the
geyser tube of Icelands Great Geyser just before it erupted.
Bunsen and Kirchhoff, a Prussian physicist trained at Knigsberg, met and became friends in 1851,
when Bunsen spent a year at the University of Breslau, where Kirchhoff was also teaching. Bunsen
was called to the University of Heidelberg in 1852, and he soon arranged for Kirchhoff to teach at
Heidelberg as well.

Burner. Drawing by William B. Jensen. Courtesy Oesper Collection, University of Cincinnati.

Bunsens most important work was in developing several techniques used in separating, identifying,
and measuring various chemical substances. He also made a number of improvements in chemical
batteries for use in isolating quantities of pure metalsincluding one known as the Bunsen battery. He
created the Bunsen burner for use in flame tests of various metals and salts: its nonluminous flame
did not interfere with the colored flame given off by the test material.
This line of work led to the spectroscope. It was Kirchhoff who suggested that similarly colored flames
could possibly be differentiated by looking at their emission spectra through a prism. When he shone
bright light through such flames, the dark lines in the absorption spectrum of the light corresponded in
wavelengths, with the wavelengths of the bright, sharp lines characteristic of the emission spectra of
the same test materials.
Bunsen spent the last 40 years of his career at Heidelberg. Young chemists flocked to him,
including Julius Lothar Meyer and Dmitri Mendeleev.

Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie (/dbr/; French: [dbj][1][2] or [dbj] (

listen);

15 August 1892 19 March 1987) was a French physicist who made groundbreaking contributions
to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis he postulated the wave nature of electrons and
suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis,
an example of wave-particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.
De Broglie won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929, after the wave-like behaviour of matter was first
experimentally demonstrated in 1927.
The 1925's pilot-wave picture,[3] and the wave-like behaviour of particles discovered by de Broglie
was used by Erwin Schrdingerin his formulation of wave mechanics.[4] The pilot-wave model and
interpretation was then abandoned, in favor of the quantum formalism, until 1952 when it
was rediscovered and enhanced by David Bohm.
Louis de Broglie was the sixteenth member elected to occupy seat 1 of the Acadmie franaise in
1944, and served as Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.[5][6] Broglie became
the first high-level scientist to call for establishment of a multi-national laboratory, a proposal that led
to the establishment of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).[7]

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrdinger (German: [vin d]; 12 August 1887 4
January 1961), sometimes written asErwin Schrodinger or Erwin Schroedinger, was a Nobel
Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field
of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: he formulated the wave
equation (stationary and time-dependent Schrdinger equation) and revealed the identity of his
development of the formalism and matrix mechanics. Schrdinger proposed an original interpretation
of the physical meaning of the wave function.
In addition, he was the author of many works in various fields of physics: statistical
mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, colour theory, electrodynamics, general
relativity, and cosmology, and he made several attempts to construct a unified field theory. In his
book What Is Life? Schrdinger addressed the problems of genetics, looking at the phenomenon of
life from the point of view of physics. He paid great attention to the philosophical aspects of science,
ancient and oriental philosophical concepts, ethics, and religion.[3] He also wrote on philosophy and
theoretical biology. He is also known for his "Schrdinger's cat" thought-experiment.[4][5]