England: Notable Scientists, Mathematicians, and Inventors

Organized chronologically by year of death

1219 - 1292 - Roger Bacon (All Facts)

• Medieval English polymath, philosopher, scientist, theologian and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empiricism

  • He was interested in science, magic, and mathematics

• He was one of the few important experimenters in medieval English science, with an extensive knowledge of astronomy and medicine

• He first employed lenses to correct defective vision

  • Spectacles, with convex lenses, were first recorded by the namesake

  • By the early 1300s, they were being factory-made in Venice

• He was condemned by his superiors in the Franciscan Order for “certain suspect novelties” in his writing and spent over ten years in prison for it

• He was born near Ilchester

• After he moved from Oxford to Paris, Pope Clement IV asked him to send reports to him on his scientific studies

  • He wrote three major works for the pope and suggest a survey of the whole known world

• He embraced astrology and alchemy

• He argued that since deer, eagles, and snaked could prolong their lives by using toads and stones, men should be able to discover an elixir of life

1307 - 1392 - John Arderne (All Facts)

• English Surgeon

• He set moral standards for surgeons, saying that surgeons should

  • Never be foul-mouthed

  • Never take advantage of female patients

  • Have a stock of comfortable sayings

  • Never allow themselves to forget that not every patient can be cured

• He published a lengthy treatise on his most successful operation, the lancing of an anal fistula (cutting open the infected tunnel that connects the anal canal to the skin near the anus - usually resulting from a previous, improperly healed abscess - in order to allow it to heal from the inside out)

• He treated numerous knights, friars, merchants, and priests

• He charged a considerable sum of money, plus a suit of clothing an an annuity for as long as the patient survived

• Despite his success, he and other surgeons at the time failed to gain acceptance by physicians, who had been using elaborate medicines, bleeding, and cauterization to achieve the balance of humors which are believed to be part of a healthy body

• He was only able to offer a 50% chance at survival given the lack of resources of his time

• He learned his surgical skills while serving with Edward the Black Prince during campaigns in France

• After the Black Death, he went to live in Newark, which had three hospitals and was a noted center for surgeons

1350 - 1400 - John Westwyk: The Equatorie of the Planetis (All Facts)

• Work by the namesake English Astronomer and Benedictine Monk

• Work which featured a device for predicting the paths and positions of planets

• Work which was the first scientific work in English

• Work which was previously attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer

1460 - 1524 - Thomas Lynaker (All Facts)

• English Catholic Physician and Scholar under King Henry VIII

• He persuaded King Henry VIII to establish the College of Physicians

1510 - 1558 - Robert Recorde (All Facts)

• English (Welsh) Mathematician and (Royal) Physician under Queen Mary

  • He was a fellow of All Souls College in Oxford

• He introduced algebra into England

1557 - Robert Recorde: Whetstone of Witte (All Facts)

• Book in which the namesake author proposed the use of the sign “=” to denote “equals” which was thereafter employed by mathematicians for purposes of being consistent with their work

1540 - 1595 - Robert Adam (All Facts)

• English Surveyor during the English Renaissance / reign of Queen Elizabeth

1544 - 1603 - William Gilbert (All Facts)

• English Physicist and Physician

• He was the court physician of Queen Elizabeth of England

1600 - William Gilbert: De Magnete (All Facts)

• First treatise which established a comprehensive theory of terrestrial magnetism and electricity, in which he

  • compared the Earth to a magnet, suggesting that the Earth was a giant magnet with its own magnetic field

  • determined the existence of a magnetic field

1527 - 1609 - John Dee (All Facts)

• English Mathematician, Astronomer, Astrologist, Alchemist, Occultist, and Teacher

  • He was the court astronomer and astrologer for Queen Elizabeth

• He helped to revive interest in mathematics in England

• As a magician and scientist, he was a leading representative of the Hermetic tradition of alchemical study

  • This tradition sought to establish mystical connection among empirical phenomena with the help of experimentation and was influenced by the Cambridge Platonists and the development of Newtonian science

1560 - 1612 - John Harrington (All Facts)

• English Inventor of the Flush Toilet

  • In his Kelston mansion in Somerset, which he had built, he installed what came to be known as the world’s first toilet which could be flushed from an overhead tank

  • Despite his invention, human waste was still widely and manually collected and disposed of for a long time afterwards

    • It solved the problem of its having to be spread out onto land

    • It created a new problem of the waste water seeping into rivers and ponds upon being drained from the tank

• He was the so-called “saucy godson” of Queen Elizabeth of England

  • He was banished from the court of Queen Elizabeth for telling risque stories in front of the ladies

1551 - 1629 - John Speed (All Facts)

• English Cartographer

• He began as a tailor in the Merchant Tailors’ Company in London

• He later built himself a house in Moorfields

• He devoted himself to the study of antiquity

• His historical learning brought him into contact with Sir Fulke Greville, who became his patron

• He received help on his work from many scholars including Robert Cotton and Henry Spelman

1612 - John Speed: Theater of the Empire of Great Britain (All Facts)

• Work which brings together a series of 54 maps of different areas of England and Wales which had already appeared separately over the four years prior to the namesake work’s publication

1561 - 1630 - Henry Briggs (All Facts)

• English Mathematician

• He greatly facilitated the use of logarithmic tables

1577 - 1640 - Robert Burton (All Facts)

• English Encyclopedist

1621 - Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy (All Facts)

• Medical treatise about depression

• It was a strange book indebted to a huge range of classical and medieval writers

• As a form of English prose, it represented English prose’s having acquired a new eloquence

1571 - 1641 - Thomas Mun (All Facts)

• English Economist and Writer

• He was a Mercantilist, in that he held that governmental regulation of the economy was necessary to increase the power of the state, since a nation’s economic power depended on the bullion at its disposal

  • In the Mercantilist view, a key factor is the monopolization of colonial trade by the mother country

1578 - 1657 - William Harvey (All Facts)

• English Physician

  • He was born in Folkestone

  • He was the eldest of seven sons of the mayor of the Kentish town

  • He studied in Padua

  • He was awarded at the fellowship of the College of Physicians

  • He established himself as a brilliant teacher

• He was the court physician for King Charles of England

• He discovered the circulation of the blood (the Circulatory System)

  • He had studied valves and realized that blood must flow in one direction only

  • His discovery was confirmed later when improvements in the microscope had developed

• His mechanistic view of man perfectly complemented his contemporary Gailelo’s mechanistic view of the universe

1628 - William Harvey: De Motu Cordis / Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (All Facts)

• Small book of only 72 pages that recorded the results of experiments with animals

• Treatise which asserts that the blood in our bodies is constantly on the move, driven by the heart, a natural pump

  • Up to the point of its publication, the medical profession in Europe believed in the theory of Galen, that the function of the heart was that of a natural oven to keep the blood warm, and that blood was subject to a kind of tidal ebb and flow

• Treatise which asserts that

  • blood is driven in a circulatory system

  • demonstrates that the heart beats through muscular contraction, squeezing blood out of its interior into arteries through one-way valves and then it returns the blood back to the heart through the veins

  • demonstrates that the system does this with the same blood that had left earlier being the same blood that comes back to the heart, that is, it is recycled and not, as had been thought up to the point of the namesake’s publication, freshly made

1651 - William Harvey: On the Generation of Animals / De Generatione Animalium (All Facts)

• Work which covers 35 years of research into animal reproduction conducted by the namesake author

• Work which traces the development of chicken and deer embryos in unprecedented detail

• Work in which the namesake author concludes that it is not, as has been thought, the mixture of semen and menstrual blood that produces a fetus, but the presence of an egg in the female which contains within itself the substance and power to develop into an animal

• Work in which the namesake author advises midwives that the infant instinctively knows how to be born

1574 - 1660 - William Oughtred (All Facts)

• English Mathematician

• He proposed the symbol “x” for multiplication

• He invented the “slide rule”

1621 - 1675 - Thomas Willis (All Facts)

• English Physician and Medical Researcher

• He was a founding member of the Royal Society of London

1641 - 1679 - John Mayow (All Facts)

• English Chemist

• He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London

• He carried out an experiment in which he placed a lighted candle inside a bell jar under water

• He invented a real technique for handling gases

1674 - John Mayow: Tractatus quinque medico-physici (All Facts)

• Work which describes air as consisting of two elements, one inert, the other active

1599 - 1683 - Joseph Jencks (All Facts)

• English Inventor and Craftsmen

• He arrived in Lynn in Massachusetts and set up iron and brass works there

1601 - 1683 - Peter Chamberlain (All Facts)

• English Physician and Inventor

• He invented the obstetrical (midwifery) forceps

1623 - 1687 - William Petty (All Facts)

• English Economist, Inventor, and Mathematician

• He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London

  • He was one of its first members

• He invented the first copying machine

• He invented the first double-keeled boat

1662 - William Petty: Treatise on Taxes (All Facts)

1690 - William Petty: Political Arithmetic (All Facts)

• Study of the value of comparative statistics

• Published after the namesake author’s death

1624 - 1689 - Thomas Sydenham (All Facts)

• English Physician

  • He is known as the “Hippocrates of England”

• He invented laudanum (a medicine with an opium base)

• He wrote a famous treatise on gout

1627 - 1691 - Robert Boyle (All Facts)

• Anglo-Irish Chemist, Physicist, and Inventor

  • He was a founding member of the Royal Society of London

• He is most famous for his namesake law which he formulated, governing the compression and expansion of gases kept at constant temperatures

  • The law states that the pressure of a given quantity of gas varies inversely with its volume provided that the temperature is kept constant

  • He arrived at this formulation after numerous experiments at Oxford where he had been helped by fellow inventor Robert Hooke

  • He found that gas pressure varies inversely with volume

• He showed the crucial role of air in

  • combustion (having improved von Guericke’s pump)

  • respiration (breathing)

  • circulation (the circulation of blood)

  • the transmission of sound

• He was concerned about the behaviors of gases and the nature of chemical substances

• He investigated

  • the freezing of water

  • the refractive properties of glass

  • the nature of electricity

1661 - Robert Boyle: The Skeptical Chemist (All Facts)

• Work which rejects Aristotle’s theory of the “elements”

• Work which defines simple and primitive bodies and complex bodies

• Work which defines the concepts of element, alkali, and acid

1616 - 1703 - John Wallis (All Facts)

• English Mathematician

• He was a founding member of the Royal Society of London

• He coined the symbol for infinity

1635 - 1703 - Robert Hooke (All Facts)

• English Polymath

• He was a fellow of the Royal Society of London

• He discovered cellular respiration, and discovered that plants contain living cells

• He proposed that the weather can be systematically recorded

• He was the first to use a pendulum to determine the force of acceleration due to gravity

1627 - 1705 - John Ray (All Facts)

• English Christian Naturalist

1686 - John Ray: Historia Plantarum / Historia Generalis Plantarum (All Facts)

• Work in which the namesake author laid the groundwork for modern plant classification

1646 - 1719 - John Flamsteed (All Facts)

• English Astronomer

• He was the First Astronomer Royal in Britain (England)

• He had argued that England had a need to establish an observatory to determine the position of the moon and stars in order to give accurate information on longitude at sea for navigational purposes

• His enterprise and vision culminated in the founding of the Greenwich Observatory during the reign of King Charles II

  • He equipped it with instruments, mostly at his own expense

  • He worked there on a new star catalogue

1642 - 1727 - Isaac Newton (All Facts)

• English Polymath

  • He excelled at Physics and Mathematics as well as Astronomy

  • He was the son of a Lincolnshire yeoman

  • He recognized early on that he was suited to a life of learning and invention

  • He was educated at Cambridge University, where, as a student, he was quick to respond to the key scientific ideas of his time

  • He was heavily influenced by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Rene Descartes

  • When the Great Plague of London hit and closed Cambridge University, he had the opportunity to write up some of the many notes he had compiled

• He was a founding member of the Royal Society of London

• He

  • discovered the Law of Universal Gravitation, which identified the nature of the earth’s gravity and the pull of the heavenly bodies

    • He correctly concluded that it obeys the inverse square law

    • He initially conducted experiments with / conceived of gravity

  • developed differential calculus

    • it was initially a secret, but became widely adopted

  • invented the reflecting telescope

  • began to think about matter as being composed of particles in motion being held together by various forces

• His view that the same set of laws, comprehensible with the aid of the physical sciences and applicable throughout the universe, was fundamental to the development of the mechanistic and optimistic philosophies that emerged in the century in which he lived

1669 - Isaac Newton: On Analysis of Infinite Series (All Facts)

• Work in which the namesake author describes “fluxions,” a mathematical tool for analyzing the slopes of curves and the areas bounded by them which developed into the field of mathematics known as calculus

1687 - Isaac Newton: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy / Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (All Facts)

• Work in which the namesake author spent two long and hard years of sustaining writing and was proclaimed a masterpiece by those fellow Englishmen who were able to understand it; it was divided into three parts including

  • the first part, which is devoted to the motions of bodies in an an unresisting medium, such as planets in orbit around the sun

    • this part deals with the behavior of moving bodies and enunciates his three laws of motion and principles of gravitation

  • the second part, which looks at bodies in resisting mediums, such as fluids

    • this part also deals with wave motion

  • the third part, which applies these mechanical theories to astronomical problems and demonstrates what the namesake author calls “the frame of the System of the World”

    • this part utilizes the principles expounded in the first two parts to explain the motion of bodies on the Earth and in the universe, formulating a revolutionary conception

• Work in which the namesake author

  • formulates the universal law of gravitation

    • He supported this gravitational theory with detailed and convincing mathematical proofs, including the use of calculus

    • The notion of this gravitational force captured the imagination of everyone in England at the time

    • He describes how every single piece of matter in the universe, from a star to a feather, exerts a force on every other particle and that such force is proportional to the production of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them

    • This law makes sense of the whole structure of the cosmos, and produced a unified description of both the earth and the heavens

  • explicitly defines certain concepts including

    • force

    • momentum

    • mass

    • the three laws of motion

      • the first deals with inertia in which a body stays at rest unless acted upon by forces

      • the second states that the change of motion in a body is proportional to the force acting on it and is in a straight line

      • the third states that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction

  • defends the idea of a gravitational force by arguing that science should merely establish overserved regularities, without speculating about underlying mechanisms

1704 - Isaac Newton: Optics (All Facts)

• Work which presented the namesake author’s main discoveries concerning light and color

1674 - 1741 - Jethro Tull (All Facts)

• English / British Agriculturalist and Inventor

  • He was from Berkshire

• He brought about the British Agricultural Revolution with his invention of the Seed Drill

  • Despite his Seed Drill and other practical farm management devices and ideas which benefited the farmer, he was not universally popular because farm laborers feared the Seed Drill and his other devices would be automated and would put them out of work

    • Some farm laborers even went on strike against its implementation

1656 - 1742 - Edmund Halley (All Facts)

• English Astronomer and Polymath

  • He was the 2nd Astronomer Royal in England / Britain

1679 - Edmund Halley: A Catalogue of the Stars of the South / Southern Hemisphere // Catalogus Stellarum Australium (All Facts)

• A catalogue of the stars in the southern hemisphere

1705 - Edmund Halley: Trajectory of Comets (All Facts)

• Work in which the namesake author succeeded in computing the motions (orbits) of comets

  • He argued that comets in the sky followed a regular pattern

  • He demonstrated that comets travelled in elliptical orbits

  • He showed that the comets observed in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were, in fact, the same object on its periodic journey through space

  • He showed that the comets observed in 1305, 1380, and 1456 were, in fact, the same object on its periodic journey through space, of this same body

  • He estimated the orbit of a comet he observed (his namesake comet) and found that it would return to the vicinity of Earth in December 1758, nobody of which was convinced would come until and unless the comet had made its predicted reappearance

  • He based his calculations on Isaac Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”

• Up until the namesake author’s studies, comets were notoriously difficult to study because

  • their appearance was so sudden and short-lived

  • they were surrounded throughout history by superstition and fear