Science & Invention

The Big Bang theory, the saxophone, Bakelite, the World Wide Web’s European home, Belgian minds that reshaped the world.

Part of Belgium

22 moments in this segment.

1. 1543-01-01 - Vesalius - Modern Anatomy. Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 "De humani corporis fabrica" founded modern human anatomy.
2. 1569-01-01 - Mercator’s Projection. Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 map projection still shapes how the world pictures itself.
3. 1570-01-01 - Ortelius - The First Atlas. Antwerp’s Abraham Ortelius compiled the first modern world atlas in 1570.
4. 1576-01-01 - The Plantin Press. Antwerp’s great Renaissance printing house, now the UNESCO Plantin-Moretus Museum.
5. 1585-01-01 - Simon Stevin. The Bruges mathematician who introduced decimal fractions to Europe, a Renaissance polymath.
6. 1832-01-01 - Joseph Plateau. The Ghent physicist whose phenakistiscope made images move, a grandfather of cinema.
7. 1835-01-01 - Quetelet & the "Average Man". Adolphe Quetelet of Brussels founded social statistics and gave us the Body Mass Index.
8. 1846-01-01 - Adolphe Sax & the Saxophone. Dinant’s Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone in 1846, the instrument that defined jazz.
9. 1863-01-01 - Ernest Solvay. The soda-ash industrialist whose fortune funded the legendary Solvay physics conferences.
10. 1865-01-01 - Kekulé’s Benzene Ring. The Ghent-professor dream of a snake biting its tail, the structure of benzene.
11. 1871-01-01 - Zénobe Gramme’s Dynamo. The Belgian inventor whose 1871 dynamo made practical electric power generation possible.
12. 1900-01-01 - The Antwerp Port. One of the world’s great ports and Europe’s petrochemical engine, Belgian industry at planetary scale.
13. 1900-01-01 - The Antwerp Diamond District. For centuries the world’s diamond-trading heart, a square kilometre that cut most of history’s gems.
14. 1907-01-01 - Bakelite - The First Plastic. Leo Baekeland’s 1907 invention of Bakelite launched the age of plastics.
15. 1927-01-01 - Georges Lemaître - The Big Bang. The Belgian priest-physicist who first proposed the expanding universe and the "primeval atom".
16. 1927-01-01 - The Solvay Conferences. Brussels, 1927: the most famous photograph in physics, Einstein, Curie, Bohr and the birth of quantum theory.
17. 1938-01-01 - Corneille Heymans - Nobel Medicine. The Ghent physiologist who won the 1938 Nobel for discovering how the body senses blood oxygen.
18. 1957-01-01 - Paul-Henri Spaak. The Belgian statesman called a "founding father of Europe", first president of the UN General Assembly.
19. 1958-01-01 - Dominique Pire - Nobel Peace. The Belgian Dominican friar who won the 1958 Nobel Peace Prize for aiding post-war refugees.
20. 1977-01-01 - Ilya Prigogine - Nobel Chemistry. The Brussels chemist whose work on dissipative structures won the 1977 Nobel.
21. 1989-01-01 - Belgian Minds at CERN. The continent’s great physics laboratory, where the Web was born, Belgian science woven into European big science.
22. 2013-01-01 - François Englert - Higgs Boson. The Brussels physicist who shared the 2013 Nobel for predicting the Higgs boson.