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Michael Faraday

The credit for generating electric current on a practical scale goes to the famous English scientist, Michael Faraday.

Faraday was greatly interested in the invention of the electromagnet, but his brilliant mind took earlier experiments still further. If electricity could produce magnetism, why couldn't magnetism produce electricity.

In 1831, Faraday found the solution. Electricity could be produced through magnetism by motion. He discovered that when a magnet was moved inside a coil of copper wire, a tiny electric current flows through the wire. Of course, by today's standards, Faraday's electric dynamo or electric generator was crude, and provided only a small electric current be he discovered the first method of generating electricity by means of motion in a magnetic field.

Benjamin Franklin

Franklin was an American writer, publisher, scientist and diplomat, who helped to draw up the famous Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

In 1752 Franklin proved that lightning and the spark from amber were one and the same thing.

The story of this famous milestone is a familiar one, in which Franklin fastened an iron spike to a silken kite, which he flew during a thunderstorm, while holding the end of the kite string by an iron key. When lightening flashed, a tiny spark jumped from the key to his wrist. The experiment proved Franklin's theory, but was extremely dangerous - He could easily have been killed

Walter H. Schottky

Walter Hermann Schottky (23 July 1886, Zürich, Switzerland – 4 March 1976, Pretzfeld, West Germany) was a German physicist who invented the screen-grid vacuum tube in 1915 and the tetrode in 1919 while working at Siemens.
In 1938, Schottky formulated a theory predicting the Schottky effect, now used in Schottky diodes.

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld

Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (April 18, 1881 – August 28, 1963) was an Austro-Hungarian physicist. He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary (now called Lviv in Ukraine).

He invented the MOSFET (in 1925) and the electrolytic capacitor in the 1920s.

He filed several patents describing the construction and operation of transistors as well as many features of modern transistors.

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist.

His most significant achievement was the development of the classical electromagnetic theory, synthesizing all previous unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and even optics into a consistent theory.

His set of equations—Maxwell's equations—demonstrated that electricity, magnetism and even light are all manifestations of the same phenomenon: the electromagnetic field. From that moment on, all other classical laws or equations of these disciplines became simplified cases of Maxwell's equations.

Maxwell's work in electromagnetism has been called the "second great unification in physics",after the first one carried out by Isaac Newton.

Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves, and at the constant speed of light.

Finally, in 1864 Maxwell wrote A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field where he first proposed that light was in fact undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. His work in producing a unified model of electromagnetism is considered to be one of the greatest advances in physics.

Maxwell also developed the Maxwell distribution, a statistical means to describe aspects of the kinetic theory of gases. These two discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for future work in such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. He is also known for creating the first true colour photograph in 1861.

Maxwell is considered by many physicists to be the nineteenth century scientist with the greatest influence on twentieth century physics. His contributions to the science are considered by many to be of the same magnitude as those of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

In 1931, on the centennial of Maxwell's birthday, Einstein himself described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton." Einstein kept a photograph of Maxwell on his study wall, alongside pictures of Michael Faraday and Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 ) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian and one of the most influential men in human history.

In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering.

Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.

In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum.

In optics, he built the first "practical" reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.

In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalised binomial theorem, developed the so-called "Newton's method" for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.

Newton's stature among scientists remains at the very top rank, as demonstrated by a 2005 survey of scientists in Britain's Royal Society asking who had the greater effect on the history of science, Newton was deemed much more influential than Albert Einstein.