At university and in the field, Darwin trained his scientific thinking as would a geologist, seeking causal explanations for observed natural phenomena.
Orville and Wilbur Wright wanted to create a practical machine—not a novelty or a gimmick—and they accomplished that at Ohio’s Huffman Prairie on October 5, 1905.
Can insects communicate? In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists disagreed on whether bees could possess a “language” expressed through motion.
Clarke’s interest in oceanic exploration in the 1950s was, like his undersea fiction, often neglected by an audience focused on the race for outer space.
As cave exploration became more popular and speleology developed as an academic discipline, cave explorers were drawn into a problematic European nationalism.
With air-minded films, poems, and demonstrations, Soviet leaders sought to lift peasants out of their “backward” lives and into the world of the modern proletariat.
Seventeenth-century science was so competitive that Christiaan Huygens used a cipher to conceal his Saturn observations when sharing them with interlocutors.
After creating a projector called the Phantoscope in 1895, C. Francis Jenkins successfully tackled the problem of transmitting motion pictures through radio.
The 1950 establishment of a federal agency devoted to space, physics, and more belied a cross-party consensus that such disciplines were vital to national interest.
Allesandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, the earliest electric battery, in part because of his investigations into the torpedo, an electric ray fish.
When FitzRoy distributed barometers to local fishing communities, he empowered individual sailors to use their own judgment about the weather forecast.
In 1966, the Soviet Union’s Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon, helping to resolve questions about the nature of the lunar surface.
During the Cold War, small groups of Americans lived together in space and at the bottom of the sea, offering psychologists a unique study opportunity.
The efficiency of the postal system and generosity of local experts played important roles in the advancement of entomology in eighteenth-century France.
Cultural forces under the Ptolemaic dynasty briefly allowed scholars like Herophilus to practice dissection—and possibly vivisection—on human subjects.
