Scientific revolutions

Andreas Vesalius publishes 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica,' a meticulously illustrated atlas of the human body.

He reveals that Galen's celebrated anatomy was based on pigs and monkeys — not a single human had been dissected.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem is a set of books on human anatomy written by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and published in 1543. It was a major advance in the history of anatomy over the long-dominant work of Galen, and presented itself as such.

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Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius publishes 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica,' a detailed atlas of the human body based on his own dissections.

He discovers that Galen's celebrated anatomical texts — medical gospel for 14 centuries — were based almost entirely on dissections of Barbary apes, not humans.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem is a set of books on human anatomy written by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and published in 1543. It was a major advance in the history of anatomy over the long-dominant work of Galen, and presented itself as such.

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Robert Hooke publishes 'Micrographia,' revealing the hidden world of fleas, snowflakes, and cork under a microscope.

His image of a flea — engraved across a fold-out page larger than the book itself — is the era's equivalent of a viral sensation.

Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon is a historically significant book by Robert Hooke about his observations through various lenses. It was the first book to include illustrations of insects and plants as seen through microscopes.

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Benjamin Franklin flies a silk kite into a storm and draws sparks from a key tied to its string.

He doesn't actually discover electricity — he discovers that lightning IS electricity, a distinction he is very careful to make.

The kite experiment is a scientific experiment in which a kite with a pointed conductive wire attached to its apex is flown near thunder clouds to collect static electricity from the air and conduct it down the wet kite string to the ground. The experiment was first proposed in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin, who reportedly conducted the experiment with the assistance of his son William. The experiment's purpose was to investigate the nature of lightning and electricity, which were not yet understood. Combined with further experiments on the ground, the kite experiment demonstrated that lightning and electricity were the result of the same phenomenon.

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Antoine Lavoisier publishes his 'Elementary Treatise of Chemistry,' naming oxygen and demolishing the century-old phlogiston theory.

He can only conduct the expensive experiments because his wife Marie-Anne translates foreign scientific papers for him and draws all the engravings herself.

Traité élémentaire de chimie is a textbook written by Antoine Lavoisier published in 1789 and translated into English by Robert Kerr in 1790 under the title Elements of Chemistry in a New Systematic Order containing All the Modern Discoveries. It is considered to be the first modern chemical textbook.

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Michael Faraday demonstrates that moving a magnet through a coil of wire produces an electric current.

When a politician asks what possible use the discovery could have, Faraday reportedly replies: 'What use is a newborn baby?'

Electromagnetic induction or magnetic induction is the production of an electromotive force (emf) across an electrical conductor in a changing magnetic field.

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Gregor Mendel publishes the results of eight years of pea-plant breeding in a regional natural history journal.

His paper is cited just three times in the next 35 years — it is essentially buried until other scientists independently rediscover his laws in 1900.

Gregor Mendel's pea-plant experiments establish the foundational laws of genetic inheritance.

Wilhelm Röntgen discovers a mysterious radiation that passes through flesh and exposes photographic plates, which he calls 'X-rays.'

His first clear X-ray image is of his wife Bertha's hand — upon seeing her own skeleton, she reportedly says it feels like seeing her own death.

Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of X-rays revolutionizes medicine by making the interior of the human body visible for the first time.

Alan Turing publishes a paper describing a theoretical 'universal computing machine' that can solve any mathematical problem.

The paper is actually written to resolve an abstract logic puzzle — Turing's 'machine' is purely imaginary and contains no circuits at all.

A Turing machine is a mathematical model of computation describing an abstract machine that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite the model's simplicity, it is capable of implementing any computer algorithm.

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James Watson and Francis Crick announce the double-helix structure of DNA in a paper just 900 words long.

The note at the end of their paper dryly observes that the structure 'suggests a possible copying mechanism for genetic material' — one of science's greatest understatements.

In molecular biology, the double helix is the structure formed by double-stranded molecules of nucleic acids such as DNA. The double-helical structure of a nucleic acid complex arises as a consequence of its secondary structure, and is a fundamental component in determining its tertiary structure.

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