Biographical

Dioscorides was a Greek physician who lived in the first century of the Christian era. He became a military surgeon under the Roman Emperor Nero and was a contemporary of Pliny. He wrote De Materia Medica (about 77 A.D.) which gave medicinal properties and some botanical information for about 600 plants. This book was not scientific as were those of Theophrastus. However, for about 1500 years, it was the supreme authority due to the practical nature of its contents, and it has been called the "most successful botanical textbook ever written." Dioscorides was believed to have had his medical training in Alexandria. He traveled widely and made observations on plants from the standpoint of their medical uses.

Boyle is a seminal figure in the emergence of modern science, and interest in him has intensified in recent years. Various major initiatives have been associated with the Robert Boyle Project, including the publication of definitive, new editions of his Works   (14 volumes, 1999-2000) and Correspondence  (6 volumes, 2001), together with an electronic edition of his Work-diaries. This website provides various facilities for those interested in Boyle’s life and work. These are listed in the adjacent menu, each item within which has its own index page giving further information about its content. 

Elizabeth Blackwell (1700? - 1758) appears to have been a woman of spirit, an accomplished artist and the first woman author of a herbal volume. She produced her herbal to secure the release of her husband Alexander from debtor’s prison for practising printing without serving a proper apprenticeship.

Christopher Wren (1591-1658), son of Francis Wren, a London mercer, educated at Merchant Taylor's School and St John's College, Oxford. The elder Wren was a well-known clergyman, rector of Fonthill in 1620, East Knoyle in 1623, and subsequently made Dean of Windsor on 4 April 1635. A Royalist, he played an important part in saving the records of the Order of the Garter from the Parliamentarians in the Civil War but died in before the Restoration.

Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley. (Woz for Hewlett-Packard, Jobs for Atari)

The history of AT&T is in large measure the history of the telephone in the United States. AT&T's roots stretch back to 1875, with founder Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone. During the 19th century, AT&T became the parent company of the Bell System, the American telephone monopoly. The Bell System provided what was by all accounts the best telephone service in the world.

From the position of a millwright in a steel mill on Pittsburgh's South Side, with little formal education, John A. Brashear became one of the most successful producers of telescopes and precision scientific instruments in the world. Brashear telescopes are still in use, worldwide, including two in public observatories in the Pittsburgh area: 11-inch Brashear Refractor Telescope at the Nicholas E. Wagman Observatory, operated by the Amateur Astronomers' Association of Pittsburgh[originally commissioned by Andrew Carnegie, so students in his Carnegie Technical Schools(now, Carnegie-Mellon University) could see Halley's Comet in 1910], and 4-inch Brashear Refractor Telescope at the Henry Buhl, Jr. Planetarium and Observatory of The Carnegie Science Center[donated to The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science by Mr. J.K. Foster on October 16, 1972; the 37th telescope produced by the John Brashear Company, circa 1900].

John Muir (1838-1914) was America's most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist. He has been called "The Father of our National Parks," "Wilderness Prophet," and "Citizen of the Universe." f our National Parks," "Wilderness Prophet," and "Citizen of the Universe." He once described himself more humorously, and perhaps most accurately, as, a "poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc. !!!!"

As lighting systems and their applications become increasingly complex, it becomes more important than ever to discover how lighting works. The GE Lighting Institute offers a variety of demonstration lighting environments that provide you with ways to translate good lighting into profits for your business.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) has evoked two fundamentally different responses: one sees him as central to early modern science, another dismisses him as an eccentric with no influence. Both views were found while he was still alive. For instance, Pacioli (1509) praised him as being among the most perspicacious of architects and engineers, an assiduous inventor of new things, famous for sculpture and painting, for his construction of the horse, the Last Supper and for his writings: that he was working on "an inestimable work on local motion, percussion, weights and all the forces, that is, accidental weights, having already with great diligence finished a worthy book on painting and human movements."1 Aspects of this view were kept alive by Venturi (1797)2, Solmi (1905)3, Uccelli (1940)4, Reti (1974)5 and Keele.6 On the other hand, Castiglione (1528)7 criticized him indirectly for frittering away his time on useless mathematical speculation. Serlio (1545) made a different claim: that Leonardo was too much of a perfectionist and that this kept him from publishing.8