Scientific revolutions

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

He finds over 200 errors in Galen's ancient texts — including that the human jaw is one bone, not two, as Galen claimed from dissecting apes.

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, showing magnified images of fleas, snowflakes, and cork cells for the first time.

While examining cork, he coins the word 'cell' — because the tiny compartments remind him of monks' rooms in a monastery.

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 kite in a thunderstorm and draws electricity from the clouds into a Leyden jar.

Franklin himself never published an account of actually performing the experiment — historians now believe his French admirers may have done it first, following his written instructions.

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 Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, identifying oxygen as the agent in burning and breathing.

The book also contains the first modern list of chemical elements — though it includes 'light' and 'caloric heat' as elements alongside oxygen.

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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English physician Edward Jenner inoculates a boy with cowpox pus to test protection against smallpox.

His test subject is eight-year-old James Phipps, the son of Jenner's own gardener.

Edward Jenner's cowpox-based vaccine launches the science of immunology and eventually eradicates smallpox entirely.

Gregor Mendel publishes his experiments on pea plants, describing dominant and recessive traits with precise ratios.

His paper is cited just three times in the 35 years after publication — then rediscovered simultaneously by three different scientists in 1900.

Mendel's pea-plant experiments revealed the mathematical laws governing how traits pass from parent to offspring.

Surgeon Joseph Lister publishes his findings on using carbolic acid spray to prevent wound infections during operations.

Before Lister, nearly half of all surgical patients die from post-operative infections — surgeons consider the deaths simply inevitable.

Joseph Lister's carbolic acid technique slashes post-operative infection rates and transforms surgery from a near-death sentence into a viable treatment.

Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally discovers a new kind of radiation that passes through flesh and darkens photographic plates.

He takes the first medical X-ray of his wife Bertha's hand; upon seeing the image of her skeleton, she reportedly says, 'I have seen my own death.'

Röntgen's accidental discovery of X-rays created an entirely new branch of medical imaging and won the very first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Marie Curie coins the term 'radioactivity' and identifies two new elements, polonium and radium, in her Paris laboratory.

She names polonium after her occupied homeland of Poland — which at the time does not officially exist as a country on any map.

Marie Curie's identification of polonium and radium, and her coining of the term 'radioactivity,' opened the nuclear age.

Alan Turing publishes a paper describing a theoretical machine that can simulate any algorithm by reading symbols on an infinite tape.

The paper is written not to build a computer but to solve a pure logic puzzle — proving that some mathematical problems are impossible to decide.

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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