William Gilbert, also known as Gilberd, was an English physician, physicist and natural philosopher. He was an early Copernican, and passionately rejected both the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy and the Scholastic method of university t...

Sir Thomas Browne was an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural...

The Honourable Robert Boyle was an Irish natural philosopher, noted for his work in physics and chemistry. He was an alchemist; and believing the transmutation of metals to be a possibility, he carried out experiments in the hope of effect...

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman...

Henry Cavendish was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine La...

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb was a French physicist. He was best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion, but also did important work on friction. The SI unit of electric char...

Galvani was born, educated and taught anatomy in Bologna. The Italian physiologist made one of the early discoveries that advanced the study of electricity. His work with frogs led to his discovery in 1781 of galvanic or voltaic electricity...

Count Alessandro Volta was born in Como, Italy, into a noble family, Count Volta was a physicist and pioneer in the study of electricity. "Volt," named after Count Volta, is a measurement of electricity. Count Volta also made discoveries in...

André-Marie Ampère was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally regarded as one of the main founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". The SI unit of measurement of electri...

Hans Christian Ørsted (often rendered Oersted in English;) was a Danish physicist and chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, an important aspect of electromagnetism. He shaped post-Kantian philosophy and advan...

Georg Simon Ohm was a German physicist. As a high school teacher, Ohm began his research with the recently invented electrochemical cell, invented by Italian Count Alessandro Volta. Using equipment of his own creation, Ohm determined that t...

Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew...

George Green was a British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism (Green, 1828). The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theor...

Joseph Henry was an American scientist who served as the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was the secretary for the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, a precursor of the Smithsonian Institution. He was highly...

Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph. In 1856 with Rudolf Kohlrausch (1809–1858) he demonstrated that the ratio of electrostatic to electroma...