History-Makers
10 pieces · 1 hours of reading
Louis Pasteur & the Invisible War
For nearly all of human history, disease was mysterious in the most literal sense: nobody could see what was causing it. People got sick, wounds turned deadly, food spoiled and killed the people who ate it — and the leading medical theory was that "bad air" (miasma) was somehow to blame. Louis Pasteur, a French chemist who wasn't even trained as a physician, is the single person most responsible for replacing that guess with an answer: germs — living microorganisms too small to see — cause disease. It sounds obvious now. It was one of the most consequential ideas any human being has ever had.
Read6 min02Nikola Tesla: Electrifying the World
Every time you flip a switch, plug in a charger, or turn on a light more than a mile from where the electricity was generated, you're using a system Nikola Tesla fought — and won — a bitter industrial war to establish. It's easy to forget electricity delivery was ever a genuinely open, high-stakes technical question. For a few years in the 1880s, it was the question.
ReadInteractive6 min03Marie Curie: Two Nobel Prizes, One Radical Idea
Marie Curie is, still today, the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Not "one of a small handful" — the only one, over more than a century of the prize's existence, in physics and chemistry combined. She achieved this starting from a position most of her male contemporaries never had to overcome: born in a country that, at the time, actively barred women from higher education, in a field almost entirely closed to them.
Read6 min04Alan Turing: The Machine That Defined Computing
Before a single working electronic computer existed anywhere on Earth, a 23-year-old mathematician described one — a purely imaginary machine, on paper, built to answer an abstract question in logic. That imaginary machine turned out to be the blueprint for every computer ever built since, including whatever you're reading this on right now.
ReadInteractive7 min05Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Fed a Billion People
In 1968, a bestselling book called The Population Bomb predicted that mass, unstoppable global famine was coming within a decade — hundreds of millions of people starving to death, no matter what anyone did. It didn't happen. Not because the population growth it warned about slowed down, but because one Iowa-born plant scientist, working for years in relative obscurity in rural Mexico, had already quietly built the tool that would prevent it.
Read6 min06Johannes Gutenberg: The Machine That Copied Minds
In March 1455, a churchman who would later become Pope Pius II wrote in a letter that he had seen something remarkable at Frankfurt: pages of a new Bible on display, cleanly and evenly lettered. They hadn't been written by hand. They had been printed, letter by letter, from metal type, in a workshop in Mainz run by a metalworker and inventor named Johannes Gutenberg. Within fifty years, Europe's presses had turned out more than twenty million books.
Read5 min07Edward Jenner and the End of Smallpox
Smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone. Today the virus officially exists in just two authorised laboratories, one in the United States and one in Russia. The road from one English doctor's experiment in 1796 to that ending runs through an enslaved African man, an aristocrat with a scarred face, and a simple piece of arithmetic you can try below.
ReadInteractive7 min08Fritz Haber: Bread from Air, and Poison Gas
Roughly half the nitrogen atoms in your body were pulled out of the air in a factory. They went into fertiliser, then into crops, then into your food. The process that does it was invented by Fritz Haber, and it helps feed billions of people. The same man, a few years later, personally directed the first mass poison-gas attack in history.
Read6 min09Tu Youyou: A 1,600-Year-Old Recipe and a Nobel Prize
In 1971, a team of Chinese researchers had tested hundreds of herbal extracts against malaria in mice, and one plant, sweet wormwood, kept giving maddening results: promising one time, useless the next. The team's leader, a pharmacologist named Tu Youyou, went back to the old books. In a fourth-century handbook of emergency remedies by the physician Ge Hong, she found a single line: soak a handful of the herb in cold water, wring it out, and drink the juice.
Read6 min10Maurice Hilleman: The Vaccine Maker Nobody Knows
In 1963 a little girl in Pennsylvania named Jeryl Lynn came down with mumps, then a near-universal childhood illness that could cause deafness and meningitis. Her father, a vaccine scientist, took a sample from her and carried it to his lab. The virus he grew from it, named the Jeryl Lynn strain after her, is still used in mumps vaccines today.
Read6 min