Medieval and Renaissance-era scientific instruments are catalogued and displayed. Find references to the makers of the instruments and the ways the tools were once used.

Vasarosnamenyi Baro Eotvos Lorand, better known as Roland Eotvos or Lorand Eotvos throughout much of the world, was a Hungarian physicist who is most recognized for his extensive experimental work involving gravity, but who also made...

Gerd Binnig co-developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with Heinrich Rohrer. The STM allowed scientists entry into the atomic world in a new way and was a major advance in the field of nanotechnology. For their achievement,...

Humphry Davy was a pioneer in the field of electrochemistry who used electrolysis to isolate many elements from the compounds in which they occur naturally. Electrolysis is the process by which an electrolyte is altered or decomposed via...

The discovery of radio waves, which was widely seen as confirmation of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory and paved the way for numerous advances in communication technology, was made by German physicist Heinrich Hertz. In the...

Luigi Galvani was a pioneer in the field of electrophysiology, the branch of science concerned with electrical phenomena in the body. His experiments with dissected frogs and electrical charges led him to suggest the existence of a...

John Ambrose Fleming was an electronics pioneer who invented the oscillation valve, or vacuum tube, a device that would help make radios, televisions, telephones and even early electronic computers possible. A brilliant innovator,...

At the turn of the 19th century, scientists were beginning to gain a rudimentary understanding of electricity and magnetism, but they knew almost nothing about the relationship between the two. Baltic German physicist Heinrich Lenz took...

For a man whose career involved the entire known universe, John Kraus had a remarkably insular upbringing. He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in physics, all at the...

The integrated circuit fueled the rise of microelectronics in the latter half of the twentieth century and paved the way for the Information Age. An American engineer, Jack Kilby, invented the integrated circuit in 1958, shortly after he...

James Prescott Joule experimented with engines, electricity and heat throughout his life. Joule's findings resulted in his development of the mechanical theory of heat and Joule's law, which quantitatively describes the rate at which...

Karl Jansky discovered extraterrestrial radio waves while investigating possible sources of interference in shortwave radio communications across the Atlantic for Bell Laboratories, and is often known as the father of radio astronomy....

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was a Dutch physicist who first observed the phenomenon of superconductivity while carrying out pioneering work in the field of cryogenics. An important step on the way to this discovery was his success in...

A discovery by Hans Christian Orsted forever changed the way scientists think about electricity and magnetism. While preparing to perform an experiment during a lecture at the University of Copenhagen, he found that the magnetized needle...

James Clerk Maxwell was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. His theoretical work on electromagnetism and light largely determined the direction that physics would take in the early twentieth century. Indeed,...

Theodore Maiman built the world's first operable laser. Ironically, Maiman's first paper announcing this momentous achievement, which many other scientists had been racing to complete themselves, was rejected. Since then, however, lasers...

This site presents year-by-year timeline of physics discoveries during the twentieth century. Just click on "Timeline," for a complete summary of physics history since 1896.

A historically significant translation of the groundbreaking text on human anatomy that changed the study of anatomy forever.