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Scientists and inventors don't have to be household names to have had a meaningful impact on the world. This episode of The List Show shares the contributions of 19 amazing scientists who have been overlooked for too long. You'll learn who developed the idea of evolution by natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin and the identity of the first woman to fly in space.
Erin (@erincmccarthy) shares scientists whose work was overlooked in their time, as well as celebrated scientists who we've forgotten about over the years.
Check out more scientists and thinkers whose work is too-often ignored in our article, 12 Overlooked Innovators Who Helped Invent The Modern World: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/62580/12-overlooked-innovators-who-helped-invent-modern-world
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0:00
Did you know that another scientist came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection
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at the exact same time as Charles Darwin? Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of MentalFloss.com
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Alfred Russell Wallace was a naturalist who had also studied how plants and animals adapted
0:14
to their environment so only the fittest survived. While he was in Southeast Asia recovering from a bad case of malaria, he sent a letter
0:20
to Darwin outlining his idea. It spurred Darwin to action. In 1858, both of them had papers on the subject presented before the Linnaean Society of London
0:29
Darwin published on the Origin of Species in 1859, and everybody forgot about Wallace. But not us
0:35
Alfred Russell Wallace is just the first of many unsung scientists, from underappreciated geologists
0:40
to the first woman to fly in space, that I'm going to share with you today. There's a long tradition of scientists elbowing aside their colleagues when it comes to winning
0:55
awards, especially for the Nobel Prize. Shortly before World War II, Austrian physicist Lise
1:00
Meitner collaborated with German chemist Otto Hahn to demonstrate nuclear fission. That's
1:04
when a heavy nucleus of a material such as uranium is split into two lighter nuclei
1:09
releasing a massive amount of energy. The discovery launched the Atomic Age. But Meitner
1:14
who was Jewish, had to flee to Sweden when Germany invaded Austria in 1938. As the years
1:20
went on, Hahn downplayed Meitner's involvement in their work, and when he won the Nobel Prize
1:24
in the mid-40s, Meitner's contributions went unacknowledged. Thanks to Ozil and Rezgonrus
1:28
for writing about Meitner in the YouTube comments. We got a lot of other great suggestions, too
1:33
We might have to make a list of more underappreciated scientists later this year
1:37
If you want to be featured in our next list show, drop your favorite fact about millennials down
1:41
below. The generation everyone loves to hate will be the subject of our next episode
1:45
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist who specialized in taking photos that could show
1:49
the molecular structure of various compounds. With this method, her lab photographed DNA
1:55
which would be critical for the discovery of its double helix structure. Three other people—James Watson, Frances Crick, and Maurice Wilkins—used Franklin's
2:03
findings without her permission. When they won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for their
2:07
collective work in 1962, Franklin was left out of the honors. She had died in 1958
2:13
Another physicist who should have gotten more acknowledgement is Xian Sheng Wu. She worked on the Manhattan Project, the United States' secret effort to build nuclear weapons
2:21
While the moral implications of the work are debatable, it's a fact that the world's leading
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physicists, not including Lisa Meitner, were involved in its scientific research. Later, Wu designed experiments that disproved a law of physics, the conservation of parity
2:36
Essentially, parity means that particles that are mirror images of each other will also behave as
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mirror images. Wu designed an experiment that showed the mirror image particles don't necessarily
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act that way which contributed to the development of the Standard Model of Particle Physics But and you probably saw this coming her colleagues in the work won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 Wu did not Physicists aren the only scientists whose contributions can be
3:01
overlooked. Alice Augusta Ball was a brilliant chemist at what's now the University of Hawaii
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Around 1915, she developed a method to make a new injectable treatment for leprosy
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Her invention saved thousands of patients. Tragically, she died when she was just 24
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And worse, the president of the university later published a paper taking all the credit for her
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work. Fortunately, a physician named Harry T. Holman set the record straight in a 1922 journal
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article. He called her discovery Ball's method, thereby recognizing her contribution to medicine
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Some scientists lived in the wrong time for society to appreciate their talents
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Mary Anning, born in 1799, was a British fossil collector who unearthed some of the most important
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fossils in history, like the first complete skeleton of an ichthyosaur. She pioneered
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the field of paleontology and upended ideas about how life developed on Earth. But as
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a self-educated woman, she struggled to make ends meet. Today, the part of Southwest England
3:51
that she made famous as a fossil hotspot—the Jurassic Coast—is a UNESCO World Heritage
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site. It's also home to List Show audience member Emma Park, who sung Anning's praises
4:00
in the comments of her episode about fossils. Thanks, Emma! As a child, Vera Rubin watched the stars outside her bedroom window and mapped their movement
4:08
across the night sky. Her hobby grew into a desire to pursue a career in astronomy
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In the 1940s, she applied to Princeton but was told that its astronomy program didn't
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accept women. It wouldn't even send her a course catalog. Rubin earned her degrees elsewhere and eventually embarked on her most important project, discovering
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why stars on the edge of spiral galaxies spin as fast as those at the center, where gravity
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is stronger. This observation confounded expectations. The visible mass of such galaxies indicated
4:34
that they should be unable to keep such fast-moving distant stars in orbit. After years of observations
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it was concluded that the universe must be made chiefly of dark matter, whose mass essentially
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holds space together. To honor her groundbreaking find, the National Science Foundation announced
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this year that its newest telescope will be named the Veracee-Rubin Observatory
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Charles Drew fought against segregation while developing life-saving technology. The innovative African-American medical researcher discovered new techniques for preserving and storing blood
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plasma and launched a huge network of blood donations to help soldiers on the battlefield
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during World War II. He even created the system of blood mobiles we continue to use today
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Drew resigned from the armed services in protest, however, when the military insisted on keeping
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blood donated by African Americans separate from that of whites. Drew argued, quote
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1. No official department of the federal government should willfully humiliate its citizens
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2. There is no scientific basis for the order. 3. They need the blood
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A lot of scientists lived in exactly the right point in history for their special talents
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But that point was a long long time ago and well memories fade Like Francis Beaufort When he was the commander of a British naval ship around 1805 he devised a scale for categorizing wind speeds so sailors could accurately record
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weather conditions. The Beaufort scale goes from zero, indicating calm, to 12, meaning
5:51
hurricane force. It's still used today to describe wind strength. And speaking of weather, Luke Howard was an early British meteorologist who came up with
5:59
a naming system for clouds in 1803. He coined the terms cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, which
6:04
help us describe the appearance of various clouds. His writings may well have inspired
6:08
a series of cloud paintings by artist John Constable and poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Fun fact, after Percy drowned in a storm, his wife Mary Shelley kept his heart in a
6:17
jar for the rest of her life. There's a long-running theory that Shelley actually kept her deceased
6:22
husband's liver thinking it was his heart, but we'll have to save that story for our
6:26
video on 30 disputed body parts of dead historical figures, which I originally wrote as a joke
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and am now thinking we might actually have to make. A name you might have heard, but not know the story behind, is Humboldt. In the early 19th
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century, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored vast stretches of South America and
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attempted to summit Ecuador's highest peak, Mount Chimborazo. On his adventure, he developed a
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theory of nature as an interconnected web, with forces in one part of the world having effects
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in others. His best-selling books made him a global scientific celebrity, honored everywhere
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he went. Plants, animals, geographical landmarks, cultural institutions, towns, and even asteroids
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were named after him. Humboldt's philosophy also influenced important thinkers, including painter
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Frederick Edwin Church. Until Scottish geologist James Hutton came around, most Europeans believed
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that Earth had been shaped by a single biblical flood a few thousand years ago. Hutton attended
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the University of Edinburgh before moving to his family farm outside the city. There, as he worked
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in the fields, he observed how wind and rain shaped the landscape. Eventually, he developed his
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key idea that Earth's rocks, mountains, and canyons had been formed by continuous upheaval and
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erosion over millions of years, a theory called gradualism. In announcing his findings, Hutton
7:37
debunked existing ideas about the planet's age and systems, which didn't make him very popular
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in the late 18th century. Hutton isn't a household name today, but the evidence, of course
7:46
eventually proved his theory correct. Charles Henry Turner was a behavioral scientist who
7:51
published more than 70 papers in the emerging field of insect behavior, despite a lack of funding and
7:56
lab access in the early 20th century. Among his findings, Turner discovered that honeybees can
8:00
can see color and patterns, insects can hear, and roaches can learn from experience and
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change their behavior. Great news! Another scientist who definitely needs more recognition is Mary Golda Ross, thought to
8:13
be the first Native American aerospace engineer. She credited the Cherokee tradition of educating
8:17
boys and girls equally as her launchpad in life. Ross worked for Lockheed's top-secret think tank—the only woman and only Native person
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there designed concepts for interplanetary spacecraft Earth orbiters satellites and rockets at the dawn of the space age Most of her work is still classified And as if that isn cool enough
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Ross co-authored the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. 3, the official guidebook to space
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She even crafted potential missions to Mars and Venus. And you might not know Eunice Foote
8:46
but this amateur climatologist developed an experiment in the 1850s demonstrating that
8:51
water vapor and carbon dioxide influenced the effect of solar heat. Observing cylinders under
8:55
sunlight, she found that a cylinder filled with carbon dioxide got hotter than a control cylinder
9:00
and took longer to cool down. This wasn't exactly a demonstration of the greenhouse effect
9:04
as is sometimes suggested, but her experiments did foreshadow further study of how CO2 can heat
9:09
Earth's atmosphere with dire consequences. Augustin-Jean Fresnel also worked with sunlight, but with totally different instruments. Fresnel was an engineer who specialized in optics
9:19
or the study of light and its properties. While working for France's Lighthouse Commission, Fernell designed more effective, beehive-shaped lenses for lighthouse lamps. Comprised of circular
9:28
glass prisms, the lenses concentrated the brightness of the light source into a beam
9:32
making the warning beacons visible far out to sea. His invention saved countless sailors' lives
9:37
and continues to be used in numerous applications today, from traffic lights to overhead projectors
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to telephoto camera lenses. Does anyone still use overhead projectors? Benjamin Banneker also put complicated science into practical use. It's worth pointing out that
9:51
verifiable details about Banneker's life and work are hard to come by. Given his unique place in
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America's history, though, and specifically African American history, we wanted to mention him
10:00
Born in 1731 near Baltimore, Maryland, he helped survey the land that would become Washington, D.C
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The multi-talented astronomer and naturalist translated his meteorological observations into a series of almanacs, leading citizens to praise not only his scientific work but also his advocacy
10:15
of the abolition of slavery. We'll wrap up our list of unsung scientists with two more women who
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looked up to the heavens. Caroline Herschel was only 4'3", but she was a giant among
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astronomers in the 18th century. While her brother William discovered the planet Uranus
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which was previously believed to be a star, Caroline discovered her first comet in 1786
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She eventually found seven more, as well as numerous nebulae and star clusters. She also
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published a massive catalog of stars that convinced the leading astronomy societies
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to admit her as an honorary member. Finally, we come to the first woman to actually go to space. Before being chosen for the Soviet
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space program, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's main interest was parachuting. Those skills paved
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the way for her rigorous training for spaceflight and her solo mission in 1963 aboard Vostik 6
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In her 70-hour, 50-minute flight, she made over 40 trips around our planet
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She then parachuted safely down to Earth. Don't forget to subscribe to Mental Floss and leave your favorite fact about millennials in the comments below
11:12
That episode will be up on March 18. Also, I would love it if you could wish
11:16
my favorite millennial, my little brother, a happy birthday. Happy birthday, Dave
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