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Curated playlist

International members of the American Philosophical Society

  • Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
  • J. J. ThomsonSeven of J. J. Thomson's students went on to win Nobel Prizes. His son George Paget Thomson won one too.
  • James ChadwickJames Chadwick signed up for physics by mistake. He meant to study mathematics, then found the neutron.
  • Francis CrickFrancis Crick was editing a manuscript on his death bed. He co-deciphered the DNA double helix in 1953.
  • Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford scoffed at atomic power in 1933. Leó Szilárd later said that speech inspired his chain reaction idea.
  • John Baines (Egyptologist)John Baines became an Oxford professor of Egyptology by age thirty. It came in 1976, the year of his doctorate.
  • Marie CurieMarie Curie's cookbooks are still highly radioactive. They are sealed in lead-lined boxes.
  • John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at age three. His father was deliberately raising a genius.
  • Hendrik LorentzWhen Hendrik Lorentz was buried in 1928, the Dutch phone network fell silent. It stayed quiet for three minutes.
  • Werner HeisenbergA spy once carried a pistol to a Werner Heisenberg lecture, ready to shoot him. Moe Berg did not fire.
  • Marquis de LafayetteThe Marquis de Lafayette lies buried in Picpus Cemetery in Paris, beneath soil carried across the Atlantic from Bunker Hill in Massachusetts. He gathered that earth himself, intending it for his grave. Americans call him simply Lafayette.…
  • Jacob GrimmJacob Grimm and his brother expected their dictionary to take roughly ten years. It was finished in 1961.
  • Joseph BonaparteJoseph Bonaparte hid on a ship under a false name while British officers searched it three times.
  • Humphry DavyIn 1799, chemist Humphry Davy breathed sixteen quarts of laughing gas for nearly seven minutes.
  • Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
  • Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev missed a Nobel Prize in 1906 by a single vote. The Swedish academy chose Henri Moissan instead.
  • Michael FaradayMichael Faraday turned down a knighthood to stay plain Mr Faraday. He also twice declined to lead the Royal Society.
  • Arthur EvansArthur Evans dug into a Cretan hill in March 1900 and found a palace with over a thousand rooms.
  • Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins refused to sign John Maynard Keynes's Depression-era draft. They later reconciled.
  • Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius nearly failed his doctorate, then won a Nobel Prize for it.
  • Henry BessemerA sixteen-year-old confronted Henry Bessemer in London over her father's unpaid work.
  • Jean-Léon GérômeJean-Léon Gérôme taught more than 2,000 students, including Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins.
  • Alexis de TocquevilleAlexis de Tocqueville was sent to America to study prisons. He went far beyond that and wrote a book on democracy.
  • Niels BohrNiels Bohr passed out in the bomb bay of a British plane over Norway. His flying helmet was too small for him to wear.
  • Arthur EddingtonArthur Eddington photographed stars during a 1919 eclipse to test Einstein's theory.
  • Ivan PavlovIvan Pavlov spent his early career studying how a dog's stomach works. His famous discovery came almost by accident.
  • Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen insisted on checking every Latin inscription against the original stone.
  • Ronald SymeA 1939 book argued that Rome's first emperor, Augustus, ruled as a cunning autocrat.
  • John TyndallJohn Tyndall boiled meat broth, then kept it in dust-free air, and it stayed sweet for months.
  • Lucien BonaparteLucien Bonaparte helped his brother Napoleon seize power, then refused to live under him.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-PérigordNapoleon called his own diplomat "shit in a silk stocking." Talleyrand had secretly worked against him.
  • Quentin SkinnerQuentin Skinner turned down a knighthood offered with a Cambridge professorship. His republicanism would not allow it.
  • Roger PenroseRoger Penrose received half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that the formation of black holes is a robust prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The citation sounds like the summit of a single, tidy career.…

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