Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences...

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific...

Anders Celsius became famous for his recommendation in 1742 to divide the temperature scale of a mercury thermometer at 760mm mercury air pressure into 100 degrees, where 100 is the frozing point and 0 the boiling point of water. Because of...

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French physicist. He was best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion, but also did important work on friction. The SI unit of electric char...

James Watt was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. W...

Count Alessandro Volta was born in Como, Italy, into a noble family, Count Volta was a physicist and pioneer in the study of electricity. "Volt," named after Count Volta, is a measurement of electricity. Count Volta also made discoveries in...

Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that t...

Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew...

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. He was highly...

Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph. In 1856 with Rudolf Kohlrausch (1809–1858) he demonstrated that the ratio of electrostatic to electroma...

Ernst Werner von Siemens was a German inventor and industrialist. He is world known for his advances in various technologies, and chose to work on perfecting technologies that have already been established. Siemens invented a telegraph that...

James Prescott Joule was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work. This led to the law of conservation of energy, which led to the dev...

The Right Honourable William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, GCVO, OM, PC, PRS was a Scottish-Irish mathematical physicist and engineer, an outstanding leader in the physical sciences of the 19th century. Kelvin is known especially for his work...

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist, of the University of Würzburg, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen Rays. Röntgen's discovery of x-ra...

Antoine Henri Becquerel was a physicist, Nobel laureate, and the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. For work in this field he, along with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit f...