- Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (April 17 1790) was one of the most critical Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a leading author, political theorist, politician, printer, scientist, inventor, civic activist, environmentalist, and diplomat. As a scientist he was a major figure in the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As a political writer and activist he, more than anyone, invented the idea of an American nation, … - Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943) was an inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer. Born in Smiljan, Croatia, he was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is best known for his many revolutionary contributions to the discipline of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th century. - Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11 1847 - October 18 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, … - Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday, FRS (September 22, 1791 – August 25, 1867) was an English chemist and physicist (or "natural philosopher", in the terminology of that time) who contributed significantly to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Faraday studied the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a DC electric current, and established the basis for the magnetic field concept in physics. He discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. - James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 - 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist. His most significant achievement was formulating a set of equations - eponymously named Maxwell's equations - that for the first time expressed the basic laws of electricity and magnetism in a unified fashion. He also developed the Maxwell distribution, a statistical means to describe aspects of the kinetic theory of gases. - Alessandro Volta
Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (February 18, 1745 - March 5, 1827) was an Italian physicist known especially for the development of the electric battery in 1800. - Joseph Henry
Joseph Henry (December 17 1797 - May 13 1878) was a Scottish-American scientist who served as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During his lifetime, he was considered one of the greatest American scientists since Benjamin Franklin. While building electromagnets, Henry discovered the electromagnetic phenomenon of self-inductance. He also discovered mutual inductance independently of Faraday, though Faraday was the first to publish his results. - Luigi Galvani
Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician and physicist who lived and died in Bologna. In 1771, he discovered that the muscles of dead frogs twitched when struck by a spark. He was a pioneer in modern obstetrics, and discovered that muscle and nerve cells produce electricity. - John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence. - William Gilbert
William Gilbert, also known as Gilberd (Colchester, England, May 24, 1544 - London, England, November 30, 1603) was an English physician and a natural philosopher. He was an early Copernican, and passionately rejected both the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy and the Scholastic method of university teaching. After gaining his MD from Cambridge in 1569, and a short spell as bursar of St John's College, Cambridge, … - André-Marie Ampère
André-Marie Ampère, was a French physicist who is generally credited as one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism. The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him. - William Watson
William Watson (3 April 1715 - 10 May 1787) was an English physician and scientist who was born and died in London. His early work was in botany, and he helped to introduce the work of Carolus Linnaeus into England. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1741 and vice president in 1772. In 1746 he showed that the capacity of the Leyden jar could be increased by coating it inside and out with lead foil. - William Crookes
Sir William Crookes, OM, FRS (17 June 1832 – 4 April 1919) was an English chemist and physicist. Sir William attended the Royal College of Chemistry, in London, and worked on spectroscopy. In 1861, Crookes discovered a previously unknown element with a bright green emission line in its spectrum and named the element thallium, from the Greek "thallos", a green shoot. Crookes also identified the first known sample of helium, in 1895. - James Prescott Joule
James Prescott Joule, FRS (December 24, 1818 - October 11, 1889) was an English physicist, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work (see energy). This led to the theory of conservation of energy, which led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived unit of energy, the joule, is named after him. He worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the absolute scale of temperature, … - Adam Beck
Sir Adam Beck, (June 20, 1857 - August 15, 1925) was a politician and hydro-electricity advocate who founded the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario. Beck was born in Baden, Ontario to German immigrants, Jacob Beck and Charlotte Hespler. He attended school at the Rockwood Academy in Rockwood, Ontario. As a teenager he worked in his father's foundry, and later established a cigar-box manufacturing company in Galt (now Cambridge, Ontario) with his brother William. - Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss or Gauß (30 April 1777 - 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist of profound genius who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, electrostatics, astronomy, and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", … - Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside (May 18, 1850 - February 3, 1925) was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, developed techniques for applying Laplace transforms to the solution of differential equations, reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. - Charles Wheatstone
Sir Charles Wheatstone (February 6, 1802 - October 19, 1875) was a British scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for displaying three-dimensional images), and the Playfair cipher (an encryption technique). However, Wheatstone is best known for his contributions in the development of the Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Hunter Christie, … - Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
Charles Augustin de Coulomb was a French physicist. He is best known as the discoverer of Coulomb's law which defines the force of electrostatic attraction and repulsion. The SI unit of charge, the coulomb, was so named in his honor. - Georg Ohm
Georg Simon Ohm (March 16, 1789 - july 6 1854) was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm started his research with the recently invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that the current that flows through a wire is proportional to its cross sectional area and inversely proportional to its length or Ohm's law. - Elvin Bishop
Elvin Bishop (born October 21 1942, in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American blues and rock and roll musician and guitar player. Bishop grew up on an Iowa farm. His family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he was ten. While in Tulsa, Elvin attended Will Rogers High School. He moved to Chicago in 1960 after he won a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he studied Physics. - Elihu Thomson
Elihu Thomson (March 29, 1853 - March 13, 1937) was an engineer and inventor who was instrumental in the founding of major electrical companies in the United States, United Kingdom and France. - Hans Christian Ørsted
Hans Christian Ørsted (August 14, 1777 - March 9, 1851) was a Danish physicist and chemist, influenced by the thinking of Immanuel Kant. He is best known for discovering the relationship between electricity and magnetism known as electromagnetism. - Walt Patterson
Walter C (Walt) Patterson (born November 4, 1936 in Winnipeg, Canada) arrived in the United Kingdom in 1960. Trained as a nuclear physicist, Patterson has spent his life teaching, writing and campaigning. In 1972 he became Friends of the Earth (EWNI)'s first energy campaigner (1972-78) at their Poland Street, London office. In 1984-5, Patterson acted as series advisor to the award-winning BBC drama series "Edge of Darkness". - Henry Ergas
Henry Ergas is an internationally recognised expert in regulatory economics. He has been closely involved in dealing with regulatory issues in a range of industries, including telecommunications, electricity, aviation, surface transport, and financial services. - Joseph Larmor
Sir Joseph Larmor (11 July 1857 - 19 May 1942), an Northern Irish physicist, mathematician and politician, researched electricity, dynamics, and thermodynamics. - William Thomson 1st Baron Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, FRSE, (26 June 1824 - 17 December 1907) was a mathematical physicist, engineer, and outstanding leader in the physical sciences of the 19th century. He did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He is widely known for developing the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature measurement. - Siegfried Marcus
Siegfried Samuel Marcus (Malchin, Mecklenburg, Germany September 18, 1831 - July 1, 1898 in Vienna) was a German but most of his time living in Austria inventor and automobile pioneer. In 1852 Marcus moved to Vienna, capital of Austria (then, the Austro-Hungarian Empire). From 1856 to 1898 he worked as a self-employed manufacturer of scientific instruments in this city. He developed an interest in electricity and as a lighting technician too. - Marcel Paul
Marcel Paul was a French trade unionist and communist politician. General Secretary of an electricity workers' branch inside the Confédération Générale du Travail, he joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1927, and became close to Maurice Thorez - without breaking his link to the unions. Drafted during the Phoney War, he was taken prisoner by the Germans, … - Johannes Stark
Johannes Stark (April 15, 1874 - June 21, 1957) was a prominent 20th century physicist, and a Physics Nobel Prize laureate. Born in Schickenhof, Bavaria, (now Zwettl), Stark was educated at the Bayreuth Gymnasium (grammar school) and later in Regensburg. His collegiate education began at the University of Munich, where he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, and crystallography. His tenure at that college began in 1894; he graduated in 1897, … - George Cayley
Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet (December 27, 1773 - December 15, 1857) was a prolific English engineer from Brompton-by-Sawdon, near Scarborough in Yorkshire. He was a pioneer of aeronautical engineering, though he worked over a century before the development of powered flight. He served for the Whig party as Member of Parliament for Scarborough from 1832 to 1835, and helped found the "Royal Polytechnic Institution (now University of Westminster)", … - Jean-Antoine Nollet
Jean-Antoine Nollet was a French clergyman and physicist. As the head of a monastery, he was also known as Abbé Nollet. He was particularly interested in the new science of electricity, which he explored with the help of Du Fay and Réamur. He joined the Royal Society of London in 1734 and later became the first professor of experimental physics at the University of Paris. - Reyner Banham
Reyner Banham (1922-1988) was a prolific architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical treatise "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age", and his 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" in which he categorized the Angelean experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each ecology. - John Wakeham
John Wakeham, Baron Wakeham, PC (born June 22, 1932), is a businessman and British Conservative Party politician. Since he left government, he has been active in business again, notably being a director of Enron before its collapse. Educated at Charterhouse School, he was a successful accountant and later businessman before his election to the House of Commons for Maldon, Essex in 1974. He became a minister after Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979. - John Robison
John Robison (February 4, 1739 - January 30, 1805) was a Scottish physicist and inventor. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. - George Aiken
George David Aiken (August 20, 1892 - November 19, 1984) was an American politician from Vermont. He served as Governor of Vermont from 1937 to 1941 and as a U.S. Senator from 1941 to 1975. Aiken was born in Dummerston in Windham County, Vermont, and graduated from Brattleboro High School while living in Putney, Vermont in 1909. A Republican, he was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives in 1931 and served as Speaker of the House from 1933 to 1935. - A. E. Becquerel
Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel was a French physicist who studied the solar spectrum, magnetism, electricity, and optics. He is known for his work in luminescence and phosphorescence. He discovered the photovoltaic effect, which is the physics behind the solar cell, in 1839. He was the son of Antoine César Becquerel and the father of Henri Becquerel. Becquerel was born in Paris, and was in turn the pupil, assistant and successor of his father at the Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. - André Caillé
André Caillé is an Canadian electricity company executive. He is chairman of Hydro-Québec, having been named to that position in April 2005. From October 1996 until April 2005, he was president and chief executive officer of Hydro-Québec. From 1982 until 1996, he was an executive of Gaz Métropolitain, a distributor of natural gas. He is a chemist, and earned a doctorate in physical chemistry (1968) from the Université de Montréal. - John Hopkinson
John Hopkinson, FRS, (July 27 1849 – August 27 1898) was a British physicist, electrical engineer, Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the IEE twice in 1890 and 1896. He invented the three-phase system for electrical power transmission for which he was granted a patent in 1882. - John Canton
John Canton (July 31, 1718 - March 22, 1772) was an English physicist. Canton was born in Middle Street Stroud, Gloucestershire, the son of a weaver John Canton (B.1687) and Esther (nee Davis.) At the age of nineteen, under the auspices of Dr Henry Miles, he was articled for five years as clerk to Samuel Watkins, the master of a school in Spital Square, London, with whom at the end of that time he entered into partnership.
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