Scientific revolutions

How we learned to read the universe

In Hand of History for July 15, 2026 you place these 10 real events back into the order they happened. Here they are in chronological order, with the date revealed and why each one matters.

1543

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

He discovers Galen — the unquestioned medical authority for 14 centuries — had been describing ape anatomy and calling it human.

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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1665

Robert Hooke publishes 'Micrographia', stunning readers with detailed drawings of fleas, snowflakes, and cork cells.

Hooke coins the word 'cell' because the tiny compartments in cork 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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1752

Benjamin Franklin flies a kite in a thunderstorm and draws electricity from a storm cloud into a Leyden jar.

Franklin never actually gets struck — the charge creeps down the wet string to his knuckle, producing a modest spark.

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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1789

Antoine Lavoisier publishes the first modern chemistry textbook, demolishing the century-old phlogiston theory of combustion.

He funds his meticulous experiments through his day job as a tax collector — the same job that later gets him guillotined.

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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1796

English physician Edward Jenner inoculates eight-year-old James Phipps with pus taken from a milkmaid's cowpox blister.

He then deliberately exposes the boy to smallpox six weeks later — Phipps stays perfectly healthy, and Jenner names his method after the Latin for cow: 'vacca.'

Edward Jenner was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine. The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae, the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.

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1866

Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, publishes his laws of heredity after tracking traits across 29,000 pea plants in a monastery garden.

His paper is cited only three times in the 35 years after publication and is effectively lost until 1900.

Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno (Brünn), Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

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1895

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

He makes one of the first X-ray images using his wife Bertha's hand — she looks at the skeleton and says it feels like seeing her own death.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German experimental physicist who produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays. In 1901, Röntgen became the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays subsequently named after him." The element roentgenium is named in his honor.

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1898

Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discover two new elements — polonium and radium — and introduce the term 'radioactivity'.

Marie names the first element polonium after her homeland Poland, which at the time does not legally exist as a country.

Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie, better known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, "for their joint researches on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel". She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".

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1936

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

The paper is actually written to resolve a narrow logic puzzle posed by David Hilbert — building the computer is almost an afterthought.

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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1942

Enrico Fermi and his team achieve the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction beneath the bleachers of a Chicago sports stadium.

The only radiation shielding is a layer of wooden boards and a zip-up balloon-cloth tent — no concrete, no lead, no dome.

Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of the reactor was the first major technical achievement for the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create nuclear weapons during World War II. Developed by the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, CP-1 was built under the west viewing stands of the original Stagg Field. Although the project's civilian and military leaders had misgivings about the possibility of a disastrous runaway reaction, they trusted Fermi's safety calculations and decided they could carry out the experiment in a densely populated area. Fermi described the reactor as "a crude pile of black bricks and wooden timbers".

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