a Dutch chemist and chocolate maker known for the treatment of cocoa mass with alkaline salts to remove the bitter taste and make cocoa solids more water-soluble; the resulting product is still called "Dutch process" chocolate. He is also credited with introducing a method for pressing the fat (cocoa butter) from roasted cocoa beans, though this was in fact ...

a Dutch chemist and chocolate maker known for the treatment of cocoa mass with alkaline salts to remove the bitter taste and make cocoa solids more water-soluble; the resulting product is still called "Dutch process" chocolate. He is also credited with introducing a method for pressing the fat (cocoa butter) from roasted cocoa beans, though this was in fact his father's invention.

a Dutch scientist. He was a professor in Duisburg, Utrecht, and Leiden, where he held positions in mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy. He is credited with the invention of the first capacitor in 1746: the Leyden jar. He performed pioneering work on the buckling of compressed struts. Musschenbroek was also one of the first scientists (1729) to p...

a Dutch scientist. He was a professor in Duisburg, Utrecht, and Leiden, where he held positions in mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and astronomy. He is credited with the invention of the first capacitor in 1746: the Leyden jar. He performed pioneering work on the buckling of compressed struts. Musschenbroek was also one of the first scientists (1729) to provide detailed descriptions of testing machines for tension, compression, and flexure testing. An early example of a problem in dynamic plasticity was described in the 1739 paper (in the form of the penetration of butter by a wooden stick subjected to impact by a wooden sphere).

a French mathematician and instrument inventor. He was inventor and eponym of the vernier scale used in measuring devices. At Brussels, in 1631, he published, his treatise La construction, l'usage, et les propriétés du quadrant nouveau de mathématique, and dedicated it to the Infanta. In it he described the ingenious device which now bears his name, the v...

a French mathematician and instrument inventor. He was inventor and eponym of the vernier scale used in measuring devices. At Brussels, in 1631, he published, his treatise La construction, l'usage, et les propriétés du quadrant nouveau de mathématique, and dedicated it to the Infanta. In it he described the ingenious device which now bears his name, the vernier scale. To a quadrant with a primary scale in half degrees Vernier proposed to attach a movable sector, thirty-one half degrees in length but divided into thirty equal parts (each part consisting then of a half degree plus one minute). In measuring an angle, minutes could be easily reckoned by noticing which division line of the sector coincided with a division line of the quadrant.

an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electrical battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the President of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity ...

an Italian physicist, chemist, and a pioneer of electricity and power, who is credited as the inventor of the electrical battery and the discoverer of methane. He invented the Voltaic pile in 1799, and reported the results of his experiments in 1800 in a two-part letter to the President of the Royal Society. With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings.

a German - Swiss watchmaker, inventor, entrepreneur, royal Bavarian real secret court chamber councilor, salt works superintendent and mine director. After his school days at the end of the 1750s, the young Johann Sebastian was taken to Zurich by his sovereign, Margrave Karl Friedrich von Baden, to be guild master Hans Conrad Pfenninger, who later became bai...

a German - Swiss watchmaker, inventor, entrepreneur, royal Bavarian real secret court chamber councilor, salt works superintendent and mine director. After his school days at the end of the 1750s, the young Johann Sebastian was taken to Zurich by his sovereign, Margrave Karl Friedrich von Baden, to be guild master Hans Conrad Pfenninger, who later became bailiff of Eglisau, sent to watchmaking apprenticeship. His journeyman years led von Clais to Paris at the behest of the margraves. From 1770 he was introduced to London society by the agent of Margrave Johann Rodolph de Valltravers.

a Hungarian author and inventor, known for his chess-playing "automaton" hoax The Turk and for his speaking machine. Von Kempelen studied law and philosophy in Pressburg, and attended the Academy in Gyor, Vienna and Rome, but mathematics and physics also interested him. Besides German he spoke Hungarian, Latin, French, Italian, and later, some English and Ro...

a Hungarian author and inventor, known for his chess-playing "automaton" hoax The Turk and for his speaking machine. Von Kempelen studied law and philosophy in Pressburg, and attended the Academy in Gyor, Vienna and Rome, but mathematics and physics also interested him. Besides German he spoke Hungarian, Latin, French, Italian, and later, some English and Romanian, which he learned during his travels in England and assignments in The Banat.