Biography

Alfred Kinsey Biography: Widely considered as the most important sex researcher in the history, American biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote two influential books on the nature of human sexuality: “Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female”. Kinsey was also the founder of the Institute for Research in Sex. Gender, and Reproduction (now named after him) at the Indiana University.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Alfred Kinsey Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1894, Alfred Kinsey’s father taught engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Kinsey graduated from Columbia High School, Hoboken, and his father insisted him to acquire a degree in engineering at Stevens. After two years, Kinsey recognized that engineering was not his passion, so he was transferred to Bowdoin College, Maine to study biology.

Kinsey finally got a B.S. in biology and psychology in 1916. After that, he was listed in a doctoral program in zoology at Harvard University, where he got his Sc.D. in 1919. He took a teaching position in the department of zoology at Indiana University where he remained for the remainder of his career.

Kinsey had already become a big name in entomology by the mid-1930s. His research on gall wasps is considered as the pivotal point in the field of entomology. Mean while his interest in human sexuality bore fruit when, in 1938, the Indiana University publication, Daily Student, issued an editorial calling for extensive information about and testing for venereal diseases, a serious health problem that had then stormed the nation.

Kinsey requested permission to design a noncredit course on marriage with about hundred enrolled participants, in which several issues pertaining to sexuality were addressed. Soon he gave up his research on gall wasps and concentrated fully on human sexuality.

His projects gained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council in 1942 so established the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana. He conducted interviews from 5,300 males and 5,940 females on which he based his groundbreaking works.

His publication about male sexuality was issued out in 1948 which sold over a half million copies. The female version, one the other hand, was printed five years later, however to a less warm reception.

The research work of Alfred Kinsey almost ended after the release of “Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female”. He had allegedly offended thousands of Americans and the U.S. congress exerted pressure on Dean Rusk, the incharge of the Rockefeller Foundation, to unilaterally terminate the financial support of the institute.

After failing to raise funding from other means, Kinsey, unfortunately, gave up his extraordinary efforts that revolutionised sexuality research. The institute, however, survived and is still functioning as an independent organisation under the Indiana University.

Alfred Kinsey died on August 25, 1956 of a heart ailment and pneumonia. He was 62 years old.

Alexander Graham Bell Biography: Only few people in this world leave their footprints on the sands of history, and these men of honour never die. One such grand personality is the greatest innovator of all times Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the first practical telephone. His other major inventions include: optical communications, hydrofoils, metal detectors and aeronautics.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Alexander Graham Bell Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Graham bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on March 3, 1847. He was the only child, of Professor Alexander Melville Bell, out of the three, who didn’t die due to tuberculosis at a young age. He received his early education at home from his father; however, he then got admitted to the Royal high School, Edinburgh, which he left at the age of 15. due to poor performance.

Bell moved to London to live with his grandfather and enrolled at the Western House Academy, Scotland. For further studies, he joined the University of Edinburgh. His first invention came at the age of 12, when he built a homemade de-husking machine to be used at his neighbour’s mill. In return, he was given a small workshop within the mill which he used to carry out further experiments.

At the age of 23, Bell’s brother’s widow and his parents shifted to Canada, to stay with a family friend. After a short stay there, they purchased a farm near Brantford, where Bell built his own workshop in the carriage house. After setting up his workshop, Bell continued his experiments with electricity and sound based on the work of Helmholtz.

By 1874, the telegraph message traffic was rapidly expanding, and there was a great need to find an inexpensive way to send multiple telegraph messages on each telegraph line.

At that time, Bell had made great progress at both his Boston laboratory as well as at his family home in Canada and his work on harmonic telegraph entered a decisive stage. Bell got financial support from two wealthy patrons but he did not have the basic knowledge to continue with the experiment. He still he did not give up and kept trying.

Bell hired Thomas A. Watson, an experienced electrical designer, as his assistant. In 1875, an accident during the experiment led to the sound powered telephone, which was able to transmit voice like sounds. At last, after the patent issue made by Elisha Gray on March 10, 1876, Bell succeeded in making his telephone work.

The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877. The Bell company engineers brought about numerous improvements to the telephone making it the most successful product ever.

Bell further carried out his experiments in communication. He came up with the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light, which was a precursor of fiberoptics. He helped the deaf to learn new speech techniques. Altogether, he received 18 patents in his name, out of which he shared 12 with his collegues.

On August 2, 1922 Bell died of diabetes at Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, at age 75, leaving behind a wife and two daughters. He was buried at the Beinn Bhreagh Mountain.

During his funeral, every phone in North America was silenced in honour of the great inventor.

Alexander Flemming Biography: Scottish biologist and inventor Alexander Fleming is widely regarded for his 1928 discovery of penicillin, a drug that is used to kill harmful bacteria. His work on immunology, bacteriology, & chemotherapy is considered groundbreaking and highly influential.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Alexander Flemming Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Born in Ayrshire, Scotland on August 6, 1881, to Hugh Fleming and Grace Stirling Morton, Alexander Fleming was the third of the four children. He attended medical school in London, England and graduated in 1906. Fleming assisted in battlefield hospitals in France during World War I (1911-1918), where he observed that some soldiers, despite surviving their initial battlefield wounds, were dying of septicemia or some another infection only after a few years.

Once the war was over, Fleming looked for medicines that would heal infections. The antiseptics of World War I were not totally efficient, and they primarily worked on a wound’s surface. Spraying an antiseptic made things even worse if the wound was deep.

Fleming came back to his laboratory in 1928 after a long vacation. He carried out an experiment and left several dishes with several bacteria cultures growing in them. After some time, he observed that some of the dishes were contaminated with a fungus, which ruined his experiment. He was about to discard the dishes, but he noticed that in one dish, the bacteria failed to grow in an area around the fungus.

Fie successfully isolated the fungus and established it was from the Penicillium group or genus. Fleming made his discovery public in 1929, however to a mixed reaction. While a few doctors thought penicillin, the antibiotic obtained from the Penicillium fungus, might have some importance as a topical antiseptic, the others were skeptical. Fleming was sure that the penicillin could also function inside the body.

He performed some experiments to demonstrate that the genus of fungus had germ-killing power, even when it was diluted 800 times. Fleming tried to cultivate penicillin until 1940, but it was hard to grow, and isolating the germ-killing agent was even harder. He was unsure if it would ever work in a proper manner.

Luckily, a German Chemist, Ernst Chain, discovered the process to isolate and concentrate the germ-killing agent in penicillin some time later. Another Australian pharmacologist Howard Florey found out the ways of its mass production. During World War 1, the goverments of U.S. and Great Britain funded Florey and Chain, therefore the penicillin almost became the magic spell that cured many diseases. Florey and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945.

Fleming married his first wife, Sarah, who died in 1949. Their only child, Robert Fleming, went on to become a general medical practitioner. Fleming married for the second time to Dr. Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, with whom he worked at St. Mary’s, but on April 9, 1953, she also died. Fleming died of a heart failure in London in 1955.

Alessandro Volta Biography: Alessandro Volta is one of the most famous Italian physicists who is highly regarded for his invention of the electric cell as well as the 1777 discovery of methane. Volta was raised in a strict Catholic family. He got his early education from a Jesuit school. He was adored by his teachers who thought Volta had all the abilities to become a good Jesuit priest.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Alessandro Volta Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Volta was very keen about study -mg electricity which was in its earliest stages at the time. He neutralized. This effect could be transformed by some external source which later changes the relative configuration of the particles. Volta believed that in such an electrically unstable state, the body gets electrically charged.

With this rather weak concept of an electrically charged body, Volta experimented extensively to study electrical induction. He was successful in creating some devices that were able to store electric charge. Subsequently, he gained fame and received grants to visit other countries. He also saw other famous scientists around this time. Volta accepted a teaching job at the University of Pavia where he stayed for about forty years.

Influenced by the efforts of Dc Saussure, Volta developed an interest in atmospheric electricity. He made certain modifications to the electrical instruments made by the Swiss geologist, making them more refined and precise. He came up with methods to measure the so-called “electrical tension ”, later named as the volt.

Volta modified another instrument called the eudiometer, which measured the volume and composition of gases. He was successful in finding out that ordinary air contains about 21% of oxygen. The modified version of the instrument also helped Lavoisier on his legendary work regarding the composition of water. Volta found out that the inflammable gas which creates bubbles in marshes was methane, which is now’ used as a fuel.

Volta initially rejected the Galvani’s idea of animal electricity. When he carried out the experiment himself, he was amazed that the same effect, momentary electric current, which was discovered by Galvani, can be achieved using metals and not dead frogs. Volta made it clear that electric currents could be generated by appropriately connecting metals or wires. Using zinc and copper wires and saline solutions, Volta successfully construced the first electric battery, widely considered to be one of the greatest and most important breakthroughs in the history of science and mankind.

Alessandro Volta retired in 1819 to his estate in Camnago, Lombardy, Italy (now called “Camnago Volta”). He died on March 5, 1827 at the age of 82.

Albert Einstein Biography: Albert Einstein was born in Germany. He was a great physicist from America and a Nobel laureate. Einstein gained worldwide fame as he created extraordinary theories related to relativity and for his suggestions and premises that are related to the light’s particle nature. Einstein is one of the most renowned physicists of the twentieth century.

A short Biography on world Famous Scientists and Their Inventions.

Albert Einstein Biography, Inventions, Education, Awards and Facts

Einstein was born on 14th March, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. He spent his teenage years in Munich with his family. He and his family had an electronic equipment store. Einstein was not talkative in his childhood, and till the age of three, he didn’t talk much. But as a teenager, he had great interest in nature and had aptitude to comprehend tricky and complicated theories of arithmetic. Einstein knew geometry when he was 12 years old.

Einstein loved to be creative and innovative, therefore he loathed the boring and non-creative spirit in his school at Munich. Einstein left his school at the age of 15, as his family left Germany due to constant failure in their business. His family went to Milan and Einstein spent a year with them. It was then that he decided that, in order to survive, he has to create his own way out.

He studied his secondary school from Switzerland and then joined Swiss National Polytechnic which was located in Zurich. Einstein didn’t like the teaching method there, so he bunked classes to study physics or play his violin. With the help of his classmate’s notes, he cleared his exams, and in 1900, he graduated. Einstein was not considered a good student by his teachers.

Einstein accepted the job of a professor and worked as an alternate teacher for about two years. He achieved the post of an examiner in the year 1902 in Bern at the office of Swiss patent. Einstein wedded his class mate Mileva Marie in 1903. He had two sons with her but they later divorced. After some years Einstein married someone else.

The University of Zurich awarded Einstein doctorate in 1905 for his thesis on the different sizes and extent of molecules. In order to highlight the importance of physics, Einstein published three theoretical documents which stated the significance of physics in twentieth century. One of these papers was based on Brownian motion which discussed Einstein’s prediction related to the movement of particles that are present in any liquid. Later many experiments supported his predictions.

Einstein’s second publication discussed the photoelectric effect. This paper comprised of innovative premises related to the light’s nature. Einstein gave the idea that light under some conditions contains some particles and the energy that a light particle contains is termed as photon. This photon and the radiation’s frequency are directly related. Its formula is E=hu where E is defined as the radiation’s energy and h is a constant defined as Planck’s constant and u is defined as radiation’s frequency. Einstein’s idea was rejected by everyone because it was against the conventional idea which stated that transfer of light energy is an ongoing process.

Robert Andrews, who was an American physicist, was surprised when Einstein’s theory was experimentally proven by him a decade later. The main focus of Einstein was to comprehend the nature of radiations that are electromagnetic. This led to the birth of a theory that will be a mix of light’s particle and wave nature. This theory too was comprehended by few scientists.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity
In 1905, Einstein’s third paper was published. It was based on dynamics of bodies in motion which later was called as the theory of relativity. The nature of radiation and matter and their interaction was the theme of discussion since the era of Newton.

The view that laws of mechanics are essential is defined as the mechanical view of world, and the view that laws of electric are essential is defined as the electromagnetic view of world. None of the view has been successful in giving a reliable elucidation for the interaction between matter and radiation, that is, the relation between radiation and matter is seen concurrently by the viewer at rest and a viewer travelling at consistent speed.

After observing these problems for a decade, Einstein came to the conclusion that the main problem was in the theory of measurement, and not in the theory related to matter. The main crux of Einstein’s special theory of relativity was the comprehension of the fact that all the dimensions of space and time are dependent on judgements that whether two events those are far off occur together. This hypothesis led Einstein towards the development of a theory which was based on two basic hypotheses: one that laws of physics are identical in all inertial positions.

This is called as the principle of relativity. The second postulate is called as the principle of variance, according to this principle; the light’s speed is worldwide stable in a vacuum. Hence, Einstein was capable of providing reliable and accurate explanation of physical actions and measures in varying inertial positions without assuming about the matter or radiation’s nature, or their interaction. Practically, Einstein’s argument was not understood by any one.

Einstein’s work was not appreciated by others, not because it was very tough or difficult to understand, but the main problem that people faced was from Einstein’s viewpoint towards the theories and the affiliation between theory and experiment. Although Einstein believed that the sole foundation of information is experience and practice, he also maintained that scientific theories are developed by physical instinct, and the grounds on which theories are laid cannot be linked to an experiment rationally.

According to Einstein, the definition of a good theory is the one that needs least number of postulates for physical confirmation. The innovation in Einstein’s postulates made it difficult for all his colleagues to understand his work.

However, his biggest supporter was Max Planck who was a physicist from Germany. Einstein stayed at the patent agency for four years till the time he became famous in the physics society. He rapidly progressed upward in the educational German speaking world. In 1909, Einstein had his first meeting at the Zurich University’.

Heithen moved to the University’ of Prague dominated by German speaking people. He then came back to the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich in 1912. Eventually, Einstein was selected at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin as the director.

The General Theory of Relativity
In 1907, before Einstein left his job at patent office, he started working on the theory of relativity. He began by defining the equivalence principle which states that the accelerations of the frame of reference is equal to the gravitational fields.

For instance, people while travelling in a lift are unable to take a decision that the force that they feel is felt by the elevator s invariable acceleration or by the gravitation of the elevator. Until the year, 1916, the relativity theory was not available. According the general theory of relativity, the connection bodies had been attributed to the forces of gravity, and are elaborated as the power of bodies on the space and time dimensions.

On the grounds on general theory of relativity, Einstein gave reasons for the changes in the orbital movement of planets that were not elaborated previously. He also told about the movement of starlight in the surroundings of a huge body like sun. Einstein became famous in 1919, when this prediction of Einstein was confirmed throughout the eclipse of the sun.

In 1921, different scientific societies throughout the world awarded Einstein the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Einstein supported Pacifism and the Zionism movement. While the World War I was taking place Einstein was one of the academics of Germany that criticized Germany’s participation in the war openly. He was attacked many times by Germans because of his continuous support toward Zionists and pacifist’s goals. Einstein’s theories including the relativity theory was criticised publically.

Einstein left Germany and went to United States when Hitler gained power. He got a place in New Jersey at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. On behalf of Zionism world Einstein continued his efforts. Einstein had to abandon pacifist because, of the danger faced by mankind put forward by the Nazi rule in Germany.

Einstein worked together with many other scientists in 1939 and wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, giving the option of making an atomic bomb and the possibility that the government of Germany was planning such route. As the letter was signed only by Einstein, helped in building the atomic bomb although Einstein had no participation in the whole work process and he was unaware about it.

Einstein participated actively in the international disarmament cause after the war. Einstein maintained his support with Zionism but he rejected the offer to become the president of Israel. In late 1940’s in US Einstein emphasized on the importance of making sacrifices to safeguard the freedom of politics. Einstein left this world on 18th April, 1955 in Princeton.

Some of Einstein’s efforts have been considered impractical. Einstein’s proposals had been very well managed and nicely planned and just like his theories that seemed motivated by the intuition of sound which comprised of wise and cautious observational assessment. Einstein was interested in politics and social issues too but it was science that really caught his interest and he believed that it was only the universe’s nature that mattered in the end.

Relativity was found in his writings. He wrote, The Special and General Theory, About Zionism, Builders of the Universe, Why War?, The World as I See It, The Evolution of Physics and Out of My Later Years in the years, 1916, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1938 and 1950 respectively. In the year, 1987, Einstein’s papers had begun to get published in multiple volumes.