Alessandro Volta

A century and a half after Galileo's death, something of scientific importance was todevelop in Italy. Volta, a former high school physics teacher in the days before online universities, found that it was the presence of two dissimilar metals, not the frog leg, that was critical. In 1800, after extensive experimentation, he developed the voltaic pile. The original voltaic pile consisted of a pile of zinc and silver discs and between alternate discs, a piece of cardboard that had been soaked in saltwater. A wire connecting the bottom zinc disc to the top silver disc could produce repeated sparks. No frogs were injured in the production of a voltaic pile. Count Alessandro Volta was born in Como, Italy, into a noble family. The Italian physicist Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta was the inventor of the voltaic pile, the first electric battery. In 1775 he invented the electrophorus, a device that, once electrically charged by having been rubbed, could transfer charge to other objects. Between 1776 and 1778, Volta discovered and isolated methane gas. Volta invented the so-called Voltas pile (or voltaic pile); the electrophorus; an electric condenser; and the voltaic cell. The volt, a unit of electrical measurement, is named for Volta.

Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen

Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen was born on March 27, 1845, at Lennep in the Lower Rhine Province of
Germany, as the only child of a merchant in, and manufacturer of, cloth. His mother was Charlotte Constanze Frowein of Amsterdam, a member of an old Lennep family which had settled in Amsterdam.

Rntgen's first work was published in 1870, dealing with the specific heats of gases, followed a few years later by a paper on the thermal conductivity of crystals. Among other problems he studied were the electrical and other characteristics of quartz; the influence of pressure on the refractive indices of various fluids; the modification of the planes of polarised light by electromagnetic influences; the variations in the functions of the temperature and the compressibility of water and other fluids; the phenomena accompanying the spreading of oil drops on water.Rntgen's name, however, is chiefly associated with his discovery of the rays that he called X-rays. In 1895 he was studying the phenomena accompanying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure. Previous work in this field had already been carried out by J. Plucker (1801-1868), J. W. Hittorf (1824-1914), C. F. Varley (1828-1883), E. Goldstein (1850-1931), Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), H. Hertz (1857-1894) and

Ph. von Lenard (1862-1947), and by the work of these scientists the properties of cathode rays

- the name given by Goldstein to the electric current established in highly rarefied gases by the very high tension electricity generated by Ruhmkorff's induction coil - had become well known. Rntgen's work on cathode rays led him, however, to the discovery of a new and different kind of rays.Numerous honours were showered upon him. In several cities, streets were named after him, and a complete list of Prizes, Medals, honorary doctorates, honorary and corresponding memberships of learned societies in Germany as well as abroad, and other honours would fill a whole page of this book. In spite of all this, Rntgen retained the characteristic of a strikingly modest and reticent man. Throughout his life he retained his love of nature and outdoor occupations. Many vacations were spent at his summer home at Weilheim, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps, where he entertained his friends and went on many expeditions into the mountains. He was a great mountaineer and more than once got into dangerous situations. Amiable and courteous by nature, he was always understanding the views and difficulties of others. He was always shy of having an assistant, and preferred to work alone. Much of the apparatus he used was built by himself with great ingenuity and experimental skill.Rntgen married Anna Bertha Ludwig of Zrich, whom he had met in the caf run by her father. She was a niece of the poet Otto Ludwig. They married in 1872 in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. They had no children, but in 1887 adopted Josephine Bertha Ludwig, then aged 6, daughter of Mrs. Rntgen's only brother. Four years after his wife, Rntgen died at Munich on February 10, 1923, from carcinoma of the intestine.

Antoine Henri Becquerel

Antoine Henri Becquerel was born in Paris on December 15, 1852, a member of a distinguished family of scholars and scientists. His father, Alexander Edmond Becquerel, was a Professor of Applied Physics and had done research on solar radiation and on phosphorescence, while his grandfather, Antoine Csar, had been a Fellow of the Royal Society and the inventor of an electrolytic method for extracting metals from their ores. He entered the Polytechnic in 1872, then the government department of Ponts-et-Chausses in 1874, becoming ingnieur in 1877 and being promoted to ingnieur-en-chef in 1894. In 1888 he acquired the degree of docteur-s-sciences. From 1878 he had held an appointment as an Assistant at the Museum of Natural History, taking over from his father in the Chair of Applied Physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. In 1892 he was appointed Professor of Applied Physics in the Department of Natural History at the Paris Museum. He became a Professor at the Polytechnic in 1895.Becquerel's earliest work was concerned with the plane polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and with the absorption of light by crystals (his doctorate thesis). He also worked on the subject of terrestrial magnetism. In 1896, his previous work was overshadowed by his discovery of the phenomenon of natural radioactivity. Following a discussion with Henri Poincar on the radiation which had recently been discovered by Rntgen (X-rays) and which was accompanied by a type of phosphorescence in the vacuum tube, Becquerel decided to investigate whether there was any connection between Xrays and naturally occurring phosphorescence. He had inherited from his father a supply of uranium salts, which phosphoresce on exposure to light. When the salts were placed near to a photographic plate covered with opaque paper, the plate was discovered to be fogged. The phenomenon was found to be common to all the uranium salts studied and was concluded to be a property of the uranium atom. Later, Becquerel showed that the rays emitted by uranium, which for a long time were named after their discoverer, caused gases to ionize and that they differed from X-rays in that they could be deflected by electric or magnetic fields. For his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity Becquerel was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, the other half being given to Pierre and Marie Curie for their study of the Becquerel radiation. Becquerel published his findings in many papers, principally in the Annales de Physique et de Chimie and the Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences.

Amedeo Avogadro
Amedeo Avogadro was born August 9, 1776 and died July 9, 1856. He was born and died in Turin, Italy. Amedeo Avodagro, conte di Quaregna e Ceretto, was born into a family of distinguished lawyers (Piedmont Family). Following in his family's footsteps, he graduated in ecclesiastical law (age 20) and began to practice law. However, Avogadro also was interested in the natural sciences and in 1800 he began private studies in physics and mathematics. In 1809, he started teaching the natural sciences in a liceo (high school) in Vericelli. It was in Vericelli that Avogadro wrote amemoria (concise note) in which he declared the hypothesis that is now known as Avogadro's law. Avogadro sent this memoria to De Lamtherie'sJournal de Physique, de Chemie et d'Histoire naturelleand it was published in the July 14th edition of this journal under the title Essai d'une manire de dterminer les masses relatives des molecules lmentaires des corps, et les proportions selon lesquelles elles entrent dans ces combinaisons. In 1814 he published a memoria about gas densities,Mmoire sur les masses relatives des molcules des corps simples, ou densits prsumes de leur gaz, et sur la constitution de quelques-uns de leur composs, pour servir de suite l'Essai sur le mme sujet, publi dans le Journal de Physique, juillet 1811. In 1820, Avogadro became the first chair of mathematical physics at Turin University. In 1821, he publishedNouvelles considrations sur la thorie des proportions dtermines dans les combinaisons, et sur la dtermination des masses des molcules des corpsand also Mmoire sur la manire de ramener les composs organiques aux lois ordinaires des proportions dtermines. In 1841, Avogadro completed and published his 4-volume work, Fisica dei corpi ponderabili, ossia Trattato della costituzione materiale de' corpi. Not much is known about Avogadro's private life. He had six children and was reputed to be a religious man and also a discreet lady's man. Some historical accounts indicate that Avogadro sponsored and aided Sardinians planning a revolution on that island, stopped by the concession of Charles Albert's modern Constitution (Statuto Albertino). Because of his alleged political actions, Avogadro was removed as professor at Turin University (officially, the University was "very glad to allow this interesting scientist to take a rest from heavy teaching duties, in order to be able to give a better attention to his researches"). However, doubts remain as to the nature of Avogadro's association with the Sardinians. In any case, increasing acceptance of both revolutionary ideas and Avogadro's work led to his reinstatement at Turin University in 1833. Avogadro introduced the decimal system in Piedmont and served as a member of the Royal Superior Council on Public Instruction. Avogadro's law states that equal volumes of gases, at the same temperature and pressure, contain the same number of molecules. Avogadro's hypothesis wasn't generally accepted until after 1858 (after Avogadro's death), when the Italian chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro was able to explain why there were some organic chemical exceptions to Avogadro's hypothesis. One of the most important contributions of Avogadro's work was his resolution of the confusion surrounding atoms and molecules (although he didn't use the term 'atom'). Avogadro believed that particles could be composed of molecules and that molecules could be composed of still simpler units, atoms.

Faraday, Michael
Englishbookbinder who became interested in electricity. He obtained an assistantship in Davy's lab, then began to conduct his own experiments. He wrote a review article on current views about electricity andmagnetism in 1821, for which he eproduced Oersted's experiment. He was one of the greatest experimenters ever. Because he was self trained, however, he had no grasp of mathematics and could therefore not understand a word of Ampre's papers. In the course of his experiments, Faraday discovered that a suspended magnet would revolve around a current bearing wire, leading him to propose that magnetism was a circular force. He also discovered magnetic optical rotation, invented the dynamo (a device capable of converting electricity to motion) in 1821, discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, and devised the laws of chemical electrodeposition of metals from solutions in 1857. He formulated the second law of electrolysis: "the amounts of bodies which are equivalent to each other in their ordinary chemical action have equal quantities of electricity naturally associated with them." He published many of his results in the three-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839-1855). One of his most important contributions to physics was his development of the concept of a field to describe magnetic and electric forces in 1845. He first suggested that current produces a electric "tension" which produced an "electrotonic state," or polarization of matter molecules, and was responsible for transmitting the electric force. He experimented with dielectrics in a capacitor. After further experimentation, he abandoned the concept of electrotonic forces in favor of "lines of force." He maintained that these lines could be made visible in a magnet using iron filings. Faraday was an advocate of the law of conservation of energy, believing that possibility of "the production of any one [power] from another, or the conversion of into another."

c
Niels Henrik David Bohr was born in Copenhagen on October 7, 1885, as the son of Christian Bohr, Professor of Physiology at Copenhagen University, and his wife Ellen, ne Adler. Niels, together with his younger brother Harald (the future Professor in Mathematics), grew up in an atmosphere most favourable to the development of his genius - his father was an eminent physiologist and was largely responsible for awakening his interest in physics while still at school, his mother came from a family distinguished in the field of education. Bohr's subsequent studies, however, became more and more theoretical in character, his doctor's disputation being a purely theoretical piece of work on the explanation of the properties of the metals with the aid of the electron theory, which remains to this day a classic on the subject. It was in this work that Bohr was first confronted with the implications of Planck's quantum theory of radiation.In the autumn of 1911 he made a stay at Cambridge, where he profited by following the experimental work going on in the Cavendish Laboratory under Sir J.J. Thomson's guidance, at the same time as he pursued own theoretical studies. In the spring of 1912 he was at work in Professor Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester, where just in those years such an intensive scientific life and activity prevailed as a consequence of that investigator's fundamental inquiries into the radioactive phenomena. Having there carried out a theoretical piece of work on the absorption of alpha rays which was published in the Philosophical Magazine, 1913, he passed on to a study of the structure of atoms on the basis of Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus. By introducing conceptions borrowed from the Quantum Theory as established by Planck, which had gradually come to occupy a prominent position in the science of theoretical physics, he succeeded in working out and presenting a picture of atomic structure that, with later improvements (mainly as a result of Heisenberg's ideas in 1925), still fitly serves as an elucidation of the physical and chemical properties of the elements. A liquid drop would, according to this view, give a very good picture of the nucleus. This so-called liquid droplet theory permitted the understanding of the mechanism of nuclear fission, when the splitting of uranium was discovered by Hahn and Strassmann, in 1939, and formed the basis of important theoretical studies in this field (among others, by Frisch and Meitner).Bohr also contributed to the clarification of the problems encountered in quantum physics, in particular by developing the concept of complementarity. Hereby he could show how deeply the changes in the field of physics have affected fundamental features of our scientific outlook and how the consequences of this change of attitude reach far beyond the scope of atomic physics and touch upon all domains of human knowledge. These views are discussed in a number of essays, written during the years 1933-1962. They are available in English, collected in two volumes with the title Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge and Essays 1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, edited by John Wiley and Sons, New York and London, in 1958 and 1963, respectively.