Inventions and Discoveries

Physics & Technology

• Telephone – Alexander Graham Bell (1876)
• Wireless Telegraph / Radio – Guglielmo Marconi
• Airplane – Wright Brothers (1903)
• Printing Press – Johannes Gutenberg (15th century)
• Electric Bulb – Thomas Alva Edison
• Dynamo (Electric generator) – Michael Faraday
• Gramophone – Thomas Edison
• Steam Engine – James Watt
• Camera – Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (first photo), Louis Daguerre (daguerreotype)
• Television – John Logie Baird

Physics Discoveries

• Gravitation – Isaac Newton (1687)
• Laws of Motion – Isaac Newton
• Theory of Relativity – Albert Einstein
• Electron – J. J. Thomson (1897)
• Proton – Ernest Rutherford (1917)
• Neutron – James Chadwick (1932)
• X-Rays – Wilhelm Roentgen (1895)
• Radioactivity – Henri Becquerel (1896)
• Structure of Atom – Niels Bohr
• Photoelectric Effect – Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize 1921)

Chemistry

• Periodic Table – Dmitri Mendeleev (1869)
• Oxygen – Joseph Priestley (1774)
• Hydrogen – Henry Cavendish
• Nitrous Oxide (Laughing Gas) – Joseph Priestley
• Electron’s Charge (Oil drop experiment) – Robert Millikan
• Discovery of DNA Structure – Watson & Crick (1953)
• Radium & Polonium – Marie Curie & Pierre Curie
• Atomic Bomb Principle (Nuclear Fission) – Otto Hahn & Fritz Strassmann (1938)
• Penicillin (antibiotic) – Alexander Fleming (1928)

Biology & Medicine

• Blood Circulation – William Harvey
• Microscope – Zacharias Janssen
• Cell Discovery – Robert Hooke (1665)
• Cell Theory – Schleiden & Schwann
• Germ Theory of Disease – Louis Pasteur
• Pasteurization – Louis Pasteur
• Vaccine for Smallpox – Edward Jenner (1796)
• Vaccine for Rabies – Louis Pasteur
• Insulin – Frederick Banting & Charles Best (1921)
• Polio Vaccine – Jonas Salk (oral vaccine: Albert Sabin)
• Malaria Parasite – Ronald Ross (1897)
• Anesthesia – William T. G. Morton
• Vitamin Discovery – Casimir Funk (1912)
• Blood Groups – Karl Landsteiner (1901)
• Cholera Germ – Robert Koch

Exam Tip:

• Edison: Bulb, Gramophone, Motion Pictures
• Faraday: Electricity & Magnetism, Dynamo
• Curie: Radioactivity (Radium, Polonium)
• Pasteur: Germ theory, Vaccination, Pasteurization
• Einstein: Relativity, Photoelectric effect