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350 BCE
Aristole
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira, Greece. When he turned 17, he enrolled in Plato’s Academy. In 338, he tutored Alexander the Great. In 335, Aristotle made his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens, where he spent his life studying, teaching and writing. Aristotle died in 322 B.C., after he left Athens and fled to Chalcis. -
Period: 350 BCE to 1500
Alchemists and Astrologers
Astrology is the study of the link between the positions and movements of bodies and life and physical things on Earth. Some astrologers work with stars and constellations, western astrologers work with the Sun, the Moon and the planets within the Solar System. Alchemy is like trying to use a magic process to transform, create or combinate things. These studies contradict each other and were a big argument in early scientific time periods. -
1200
Roger Bacon
Roger was an English savant and Franciscan minister who set standards on the investigations of nature through different techniques. Since the nineteenth century, he is sometimes credited as one of the earliest-known European supporters of the modern day “scientific method”, a strategy created by Aristotle and used late by Arabic researchers such as the Muslim researcher Alhazen. -
Period: 1300 to
Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance followed the Middle Ages, and was the birth of the philosophy of humanism, which emphasized the importance of individual achievement in a wide range of fields. Under the influence of the humanists, literature and the arts climbed to new levels of importance. -
1490
Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452, to May 2, 1519) was a painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, military engineer and draftsman. He was a “Renaissance man.” With a curious thought process and strong intellect, da Vinci studied the laws of science and nature, which greatly impacted his work. His ideas and body of work have influenced countless artists and made da Vinci a leading light of the Italian Renaissance. -
1543
Andreas Vesalius
Andreas Vesalius was born 31 December 1514 in Brussels, Belgium. He came from a family of physicians and both his father and grandfather had served the holy Roman emperor. Vesalius studied medicine in Paris but had to leave before completing his degree when the Holy Roman Empire declared war on France. He then studied at the University of Louvain, and then moved to Padua to study for his doctorate. When he finished in 1537 he was immediately offered the chair of surgery and anatomy. -
1543
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in Torun, Poland. Circa 1508, Copernicus made his own model of a heliocentric planetary system. Around 1514, he shared his findings in the Commentariolus. His second book on the topic, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was banned by the Roman Catholic Church decades after his May 24, 1543, death in Frombork. -
William Harvey
William Harvey, a physician to two consecutive kings, studied blood circulation, and his Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628) recorded his findings. Though Harvey understood that the heart pumped blood into the circulatory system, he had no knowledge of the influence of oxygen in the blood or knowledge of the existence of capillaries. -
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer who discovered that the Earth and planets travel around the sun in orbits. He gave three laws of planetary motion. He also did important work in optics and geometry. -
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon was born on January 22, 1561 in London, England. Bacon was an attorney general and Lord Chancellor of England, resigning because of charges of corruption. His more valuable work was philosophical. Bacon took up Aristotelian ideas, arguing for an empirical, inductive approach, known as the scientific method, which modern scientific inquiry. -
Galileo Galilel
Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy, on February 18, 1564. When he was seventeen, his father, a noted musician who also earned money in the wool trade, sent him to study medicine at the University of Pisa. Galileo, but he decided to have a career change to a career in mathematics. -
Rene Descartes
René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, France. He was educated, first at a Jesuit college at age 8, then earning a law degree at 22, but a teacher set him on a course to apply mathematics and logic to understanding the natural world. This approach incorporated the contemplation of the nature of existence and of knowledge itself, hence his most famous observation. -
Robert Hooke
He was born in Freshwater on England's Isle of Wight in 1635, scientist Robert Hooke was educated at Oxford and spent his career at the Royal Society and Gresham College. His research and experiments ranged from astronomy to biology to physics; he is particularly recognized for the observations he made while using a microscope and for "Hooke's Law" of elasticity. Hooke died in London in 1703. -
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton January 4, 1643, to March 31, 1727 was a physicist and mathematician who developed the principles of modern physics, including the laws of motion and is credited as one of the great minds of the 17th century Scientific Revolution. In 1705, he was knighted by Queen Anne of England, making him Sir Isaac Newton. -
Antoine Lavoisier
E.I. du Pont moved to the United States after the French Revolution. In 1802, he started a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine River in Delaware. His profits exploded when the U.S. government placed orders with him for the troops fighting in the War of 1812. E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company lives on as DuPont, with headquarters in Delaware and offices around the world.
