Staffordshire-born Henry Joseph Round (1881-1966) lived and breathed engineering and was affectionately nicknamed ‘the tame wizard’ by his colleagues at the Marconi company where he spent many years experimenting, trouble-shooting and pioneering wireless telephony. He […]
The first dinosaur bone to be identified as such, albeit 166 years later, was dug up in 1676 on Sir Thomas Pennyston’s Oxfordshire estate and given by him to Professor Robert Plot (1640-96) at the […]
With air travel increasing in popularity in the early 1950s, scientists were faced with the new problem of jet noise. Nowadays this is called ‘noise pollution’ as it is judged to be detrimental if excessive […]
Lancashire-born William Lassell (1799-1880) grew up in Liverpool within a clock-making family, acquiring the precision engineering skills needed for his lifelong passion ~ astronomy. Financed by the profits of his brewery, he built a succession […]
Sir W.M. Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) did not know his grandfather, Lincolnshire-born Captain Matthew Flinders (1774-1814), who was the first to survey Australia’s coastline, but he certainly seemed to inherit his attention to detail and taste […]
West Kennet Long Barrow (WKLB), near the Avebury stone circles in Wiltshire, is one of 180 barrows in southern England. At 328ft. it is the second longest after its neighbour, East Kennet Long Barrow. However, […]
The Falkland Islands are a British Overseas Territory just north of the British Antarctic Territory and south-east of Argentina. English mariner John Strong (?-1693) made the first landing on the uninhabited archipelago in January 1690 […]
Oxford-born cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) said:“Look up at the stars and not at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder what makes the universe exist. Be curious.” An extraordinary […]
Britain’s two tallest mountains by far ~ Mount Hope (10,627ft.) and Mount Jackson (10,446ft.) ~ sit within the British Antarctic Territory (BAT), a sector at 20°-80°W radiating out from the South Pole. Opposite are two […]
It is hard to imagine life today without the multitudinous ways in which silicone is employed, from shampoo to contact lenses to gaskets in aero-engines. Frederic Stanley Kipping (1863-1949) from Lancashire was the first chemist […]
John Dalton (1766-1844) from Cumberland, compiler of the first atomic theory, was also the first scientist to study colour blindness, after discovering it in himself and his brother in 1794. It is a condition which […]
Dr. Francis Crick (1916-2004) was born in Northamptonshire and was one of three scientists awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This was for proposing the double-helix of DNA, which kick-started the field […]
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