Tuesday 30 September 2014

Being offered a job even before completing his PHD work, he got fascinated with seismology & developed RICHTER scale!!!


Charles Francis Richter (April 26, 1900 – September 30, 1985) was an American seismologist and physicist. Richter is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg; both worked at California Institute of Technology. The quote "logarithmic plots are a device of the devil" is attributed to Richter.


Born in Overpeck, Ohio; Richter had German heritage: his great-grandfather came from Baden-Baden (Baden-Württemberg, Germany) in 1848 due to "political disturbances". After graduating from Los Angeles High School he attended Stanford University and received his undergraduate degree in 1920. In 1928, he began work on his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, but, before he finished it, he was offered a position at the Carnegie Institute of Washington. At this point, he became fascinated with seismology (the study of earthquakes and the waves they produce in the earth). Thereafter, he worked at the new Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena, under the direction of Beno Gutenberg. Read more...

Monday 29 September 2014

The Book binder's son who invented Diesel engine vanished like air and was never found !!!


Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel (March 18, 1858 – September 29, 1913) was a German inventor and mechanical engineer, famous for the invention of the diesel engine. Diesel was born in Paris, France in 1858, the second of three children of Elise (born Strobel) and Theodor Diesel. His parents were Bavarian immigrants living in Paris. Theodor Diesel, a bookbinder by trade, left his home town of Augsburg, Bavaria, in 1848. Rudolf Diesel spent his early childhood in France, but as a result of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, his family (as were many other Germans) was forced to leave. They settled in London, England. 

Before the war's end, however, Diesel's mother sent 12-year-old Rudolf to Augsburg to live with his aunt and uncle, Barbara and Christoph Barnickel, to become fluent in German and to visit the Königliche Kreis-Gewerbsschule (Royal County Trade School), where his uncle taught mathematics. Read more...

Saturday 27 September 2014

The workaholic mathematician, who came in library science by chance is renowned globally for laws of library science!!!


Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan (12 August 1892 – 27 September 1972) was a mathematician and librarian from India. His most notable contributions to the field were his five laws of library science and the development of the first major analytico-synthetic classification system, the colon classification. He is considered to be the father of library science, documentation, and information science in India and is widely known throughout the rest of the world for his fundamental thinking in the field. His birthday is observed every year as the National Library Day in India.

He was a university librarian and professor of library science at Benares Hindu University (1945–47) and professor of library science at the University of Delhi (1947–55). The last appointment made him director of the first Indian school of librarianship to offer higher degrees. He was president of the Indian Library Association from 1944 to 1953. In 1957 he was elected an honorary member of the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) and was made a vice-president for life of the Library Association of Great Britain. Read more...

Friday 26 September 2014

A serious injury obstructing him from going to school till 11, but his passion led him to "Classical conditioning" learning!!!



Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849 – 27 February 1936) was a Russian physiologist known primarily for his work in classical conditioning. From his childhood days Pavlov demonstrated intellectual brilliance along with an unusual energy which he named "the instinct for research". Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics of the 1860s and I. M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, were spreading, Pavlov abandoned his religious career and decided to devote his life to science. In 1870 he enrolled in the physics and mathematics faculty at the University of Saint Petersburg to take the course in natural science. Ivan Pavlov devoted his life to the study of physiology and sciences, making several remarkable discoveries and ideas that were passed on from generation to generation. He won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1904. Read more...

Thursday 25 September 2014

Godesses' nine days, "NAVRATRI"!!!


Navratri is a festival dedicated to the worship of the Hindu deity Durga. The word Navaratri means 'nine nights' in Sanskrit, nava meaning nine and ratri meaning nights. During these nine nights and ten days, nine forms of Shakti/Devi are worshiped. The tenth day is commonly referred to as Vijayadashami or "Dussehra" (also spelled Dasara). Navratri is an important major festival and is celebrated all over India. Diwali the festival of lights is celebrated twenty days after Dasara.


This festival corresponds to a nine-day Taoist celebration beginning on the eve of 9th lunar month of the Chinese calendar, which is observed primarily by the ethnic Chinese of Min Nan linguistic group in Southeast Asian countries like Myanmar, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and also the Riau Islands called the Nine Emperor Gods Festival.

The beginning of spring and the beginning of autumn are considered to be important junctions of climatic and solar influences. These two periods are taken as sacred opportunities for the worship of the Divine Mother Durga. The dates of the festival are determined according to the lunar calendar. on which each women follow tradition to wear nine colours of dress on Navratri. Read more...

Wednesday 24 September 2014

This EDISON OF FRANCE created NEON industry by using byproduct & was freed from prison acknowledging his RESEARCH in OTEC!!!


Georges Claude (24 September 1870 – 23 May 1960) was a French engineer and inventor. He is noted for his early work on the industrial liquefaction of air, for the invention and commercialization of neon lighting, and for a large experiment on generating energy by pumping cold seawater up from the depths. Considered by some to be "the Edison of France", he was an active collaborator with the German occupiers of France during the Second World War, for which he was imprisoned in 1945 and stripped of his honors.


In 1902 Claude devised what is now known as the Claude system for liquifying air. The system enabled the production of industrial quantities of liquid nitrogen, oxygen, and argon; Claude's approach competed successfully with the earlier system of Carl von Linde (1895). Claude and businessman Paul Delorme founded L'Air Liquide, S.A. (Air Liquide), which is presently a large multinational corporation headquartered in Paris, France. Read more...

Tuesday 23 September 2014

Thinking himself as a scientist, this lad created a big empire in automotive ancillaries!!!


Robert Bosch (23 September 1861 – 12 March 1942) was a German industrialist, engineer and inventor, founder of Robert Bosch GmbH. Bosch was born in Albeck, a village to the northeast of Ulm in southern Germany. His father, a freemason, was unusually well-educated for someone of his class, and placed special importance on a good education for his children. As a child, Robert liked to try and invent, he would fuss with little electronic or mechanical toys and make something different out of them. He saw potential for himself to become an inventor and later studied quantum mechanics.

From 1869 to 1876, Bosch attended the Realschule (secondary-technical school) in Ulm, and then took an apprenticeship as a precision mechanic. After his school and practical education, Bosch spent a further seven years working at diverse companies in Germany, the United States (for Thomas Edison in New York), and the UK (for the German firm Siemens). On 15 November 1886, he opened his own 'Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering' in Stuttgart. Read more...

Monday 22 September 2014

The blacksmith & bookbinder's apprentice; despite a nervous breakdown became one of the most influential scientists in history!!


Michael Faraday, FRS (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include those of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis.

Faraday was born in Newington Butts, which is now part of the London Borough of Southwark, but which was then a suburban part of Surrey. His family was not well off. James Faraday moved his wife and two children to London during the winter of 1790 from Outhgill in Westmorland, where he had been an apprentice to the village blacksmith. The young Michael Faraday, who was the third of four children, having only the most basic school education, had to educate himself. Read more...

Sunday 21 September 2014

This 16th century polymath was first to describe typhoid, formulated probability's elementary rules & invented other things too!



Gerolamo (or Girolamo, or Geronimo) Cardano (24 September 1501 – 21 September 1576) was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer, philosopher and gambler. He wrote more than 200 works on medicine, mathematics, physics, philosophy, religion, and music. His gambling led him to formulate elementary rules in probability, making him one of the founders of the field. He was the first to describe typhoid fever. In 1553 he cured the Scottish Archbishop of St Andrews of a disease that had left him speechless and was thought incurable. Today, he is best known for his achievements in algebra. Cardano was the first mathematician to make systematic use of numbers less than zero. He published the solutions to the cubic and quartic equations in his 1545 book Ars Magna. Read more...

Saturday 20 September 2014

Its World Peace Day!!!

The International Day of Peace, sometimes unofficially known as World Peace Day, is observed annually on 21 September. It is dedicated to world peace, and specifically the absence of war and violence, such as might be occasioned by a temporary ceasefire in a combat zone for humanitarian aid access. The day was first celebrated in 1982, and is kept by many nations, political groups, military groups, and peoples. In 2013, for the first time, the Day was dedicated by the Secretary-General of the United Nations to peace education, the key preventive means to reduce war sustainably.

To inaugurate the day, the United Nations Peace Bell is rung at UN Headquarters (in New York City). The bell is cast from coins donated by children from all continents except Africa, and was a gift from the United Nations Association of Japan, as "a reminder of the human cost of war"; the inscription on its side reads, "Long live absolute world peace". Read more...

Wednesday 17 September 2014

The man behind ventilators & forceps from 18th century!!!

Stephen Hales, FRS, DD (17 September 1677 – 4 January 1761) was an English clergyman who made major contributions to a range of scientific fields including botany, pneumatic chemistry and physiology. He invented several devices, including a ventilator, a pneumatic trough and a surgical forceps for the removal of bladder stones. He was also a philanthropist and wrote a popular tract on alcoholic intemperance.
Stephen Hales was born in 1677 in Bekesbourne, Kent, England. He was son of Thomas Hales, heir to Baronetcy of Beakesbourne and Brymore, and his wife, Mary (née Marsham), and was one of twelve or possibly thirteen children. 
Hales was educated in Kensington and then at Orpington before attending Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (or St Benedict's as it was then known) in 1696. Although he was an ordinand studying divinity, Hales would have received tuition in the Classics, mathematics, natural sciences and philosophy while in Cambridge. Hales was admitted as a Fellow of Corpus Christi in 1703, the same year as he took the degree of Master of Arts, and was ordained as Deacon at Bugden, Cambridgeshire. Read more

Tuesday 16 September 2014

The GLASSBLOWER blew new standards of temperature scale by his name!!!


Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was a German physicist, engineer, and glass blower who is best known for inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer (1714), and for developing a temperature scale now named after him. Fahrenheit was born in 1686 in Danzig (Gdańsk), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but lived most of his life in the Dutch Republic. The Fahrenheits were a German Hanse merchant family who had lived in several Hanseatic cities. 


Thermometer consists of a bulb containing mercury attached to a glass tube of narrow diameter; the volume of mercury in the tube is much less than the volume in the bulb. The volume of mercury changes slightly with temperature; the small change in volume drives the narrow mercury column a relatively long way up the tube. The space above the mercury may be filled with nitrogen or it may be at less than atmospheric pressure, a partial vacuum. Read more...

Monday 15 September 2014

This gibraltar engineer handled the flood water, irrigation systems & patented automatic weir water floodgates!!!

Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya KCIE (popularly known as Sir MV; 15 September 1860 – 14 April 1962) was a notable Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore during 1912 to 1918. He was a recipient of the Indian Republic's highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1955. He was knighted as a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire (KCIE) by King George V for his contributions to the public good. Every year, 15 September is celebrated as Engineer's Day in India in his memory. He is held in high regard as a pre-eminent engineer of India. He was the chief designer of the flood protection system for the city of Hyderabad in Telangana, as well as the chief engineer responsible for the construction of the Krishna Raja Sagara dam in Mandya.

Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was born to Mokshagundam Srinivasa Shastry and Venkatalakshmamma in Muddenahalli village, 40 miles from Bangalore, Mysore State (now Karnataka), India. Visvesvaraya lost his father at the age of 15. He enrolled for kannada medium primary school in Chikballapur and attended high school in Bangalore. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Central College, Bangalore then affiliate of the University of Madras in 1881 and later studied civil engineering at the prestigious College of Engineering, Pune. Read more...

Saturday 13 September 2014

Uncle Sam of America laid most foundation bricks starting with packing meat!!!


 Samuel Wilson (September 13, 1766 – July 31, 1854) was ameat-packer from Troy, New York whose name is purportedly the source of the personification of the United States known as "Uncle Sam". Samuel was born in a historic town, Arlington (known as Menotomy at the time, township of West Cambridge), Massachusetts, to parents Edward and Lucy Wilson. Samuel Wilson is a descendant of one of the oldest families of Boston, Massachusetts. Through direct heritance of his grandfather, Robert Wilson, originally from Greenock, Scotland, he was Scottish with a Massachusetts background. As a boy, he moved with his family to Mason, New Hampshire.  Read more...

Friday 12 September 2014

It was a doctor; not a linguist who published first thesaurus, partly in an effort to battle depression !!!

Peter Mark Roget FRS (18 January 1779 – 12 September 1869) was a British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. He is best known for publishing, in 1852, the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (Roget's Thesaurus), a classified collection of related words. Peter Mark Roget was born in London. His obsession with list-making as a coping mechanism was well established by the time he was eight years old. The son of a Swiss clergymanRoget studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. His life was marked by several incidents of sadness. His father and his wife died young. His beloved uncle Samuel Romilly committed suicide in Roget's presence. Roget struggled with depression for most of his life. His work on the thesaurus arose partly from an effort to battle depression. 

In general usage, a thesaurus is a reference work that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning (containing synonyms and sometimes antonyms), in contrast to a dictionary, which provides definitions for words, and generally lists them in alphabetical order. The main purpose of such reference works is to help the user“to find the word, or words, by which an idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed” – to quote Peter Roget, architect of the best known thesaurus in the English language. Although including synonyms, a thesaurus should not be taken as a complete list of all the synonyms for a particular word. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between similar words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus entry does not give the definition of wordsRead more...

Thursday 11 September 2014

From starting as apprentice, opening a workshop hardly with some tools in it; he magnified his name in world of photography!!!

Carl Zeiss (11 September 1816 – 3 December 1888) was a German maker of optical instruments commonly known for the company he founded, Carl Zeiss Jena (now: Carl Zeiss AG). Zeiss made contributions to lens manufacturing that have aided the modern production of lenses. Raised in Weimar, Germany, he became a notable lens-maker in the 1840s when he created high-quality lenses that were "wide open", or in other words, had a very large aperture range that allowed for very bright images. He did this in the city of Jena at a self-opened workshop, where he started his lens-making career. At first his lenses were only used in the production of microscopes, but when cameras were invented, his company began manufacturing high-quality lenses for cameras. Read more...

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Despite invention of vinyl & 116 patents, he was inducted to Hall of fame at age of 97!!!


Waldo Lonsbury Semon (September 10, 1898 – May 26, 1999) was a renowned American inventor born in Demopolis, Alabama. He is credited with inventing methods for making polyvinyl chloride useful. He was born on September 10, 1898. Semon put his name into the history books for inventing vinyl, the world's second most used plastic. He found the formula for vinyl by mixing a few synthetic polymers, and the result was a substance that was elastic, but wasn't adhesive. 


Semon worked on methods of improving rubber, and eventually developed a synthetic substitute. On December 11, 1935, he created Koreosol from salt, coke and limestone, a polymer that could be made in any consistency. Semon made more than 5,000 other synthetic rubber compounds, achieving success with Ameripol (AMERican POLymer) in 1940 for the B.F. Goodrich company. In all, Semon held 116 patents, and was inducted into the Invention Hall of Fame in 1995 at age 97. Read more...

Tuesday 9 September 2014

From quitting assignment halfway to receiving Magsaysay award; the father of white revolution showed how things could be done!!!

Verghese Kurien (26 November 1921 – 9 September 2012) was a renowned Indian social entrepreneur and is best known as the "Father of the White Revolution", for his 'billion-litre idea' (Operation Flood) – the world's biggest agricultural development programme. The operation took India from being a milk-deficient nation, to the largest milk producer in the world, surpassing the United States of America in 1998, with about 17 percent of global output in 2010–11, which in 30 years doubled the milk available to every person. Dairy farming became India's largest self-sustaining industry. He made the country self-sufficient in edible oils too later on, taking head-on the powerful and entrenched oil supplying lobby.

He founded around 30 institutions of excellence (like AMUL, GCMMF, IRMA, NDDB) which are owned, managed by farmers and run by professionals. As the founding chairman of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), Kurien was responsible for the creation and success of the Amul brand of dairy products. A key achievement at Amul was the invention of milk powder processed from buffalo milk (abundant in India), as opposed to that made from cow-milk, in the then major milk producing nations. His achievements with the Amul dairy led Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri to appoint him as the founder-chairman of National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in 1965, to replicate Amul's "Anand model" nationwide. He is regarded as the greatest proponents of the cooperative movement in the world, his work has alleviated millions out of poverty not only in India but also outside. Read more...

Monday 8 September 2014

This nightingale had a phoenix's life, had the world acknowledge her singing & cooking; has tell a tale to inspire!!!

Asha Bhosle (born September 8, 1933), commonly referred to as Ashaji, is an Indian singer. She is best known as a playback singer in Hindi cinema, although she has a wider repertoire. Bhosle's career started in 1943 and has spanned over six decades. She has done playback singing for over a thousand Bollywood movies. In addition, she has recorded several private albums and participated in numerous solo concerts in India and abroad. Bhosle is the sister of playback singer Lata Mangeshkar.

Renowned for her voice range and often credited for her versatility, Bhosle's work includes film music, pop, ghazals, bhajans, traditional Indian classical music, folk songs, qawwalis, and Rabindra Sangeets. Apart from Hindi, she has sung in over 20 Indian and foreign languages. In 2006, Asha Bhosle stated that she had sung over 12,000 songs, a figure repeated by several other sources. 

The World Records Academy, an international organization which certifies world records, recognised her as the "Most Recorded Artist" in the world, in September 2009. In 2011, she was officially acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most recorded artist in music history. The Government of India honoured her with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2000 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2008. In 2013, she made her debut as an actress in the film Mai, and received critical acclaim for her performance. Read more...

Sunday 7 September 2014

This curious phil started playing with electricity systems from childhood; created FUSOR & had 165 patents!!!

Philo Taylor Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971) was an American inventor and television pioneer. He made many contributions that were crucial to the early development of all-electronic television. He is perhaps best known for inventing the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), the "image dissector", as well as the first fully functional and complete all-electronic television system. He was also the first person to demonstrate such a system to the public. Farnsworth developed a television system complete with receiver and camera, which he produced commercially in the firm of the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation, from 1938 to 1951.

In later life, Farnsworth invented a small nuclear fusion device, the Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor, or simply "fusor", employing inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC). Although not a practical device for generating nuclear energy, the fusor serves as a viable source of neutrons. The design of this device has been the acknowledged inspiration for other fusion approaches including the Polywell reactor concept in terms of a general approach to fusion design. Farnsworth held 165 patents, mostly in radio and television. Read more...

Saturday 6 September 2014

To mark his way from Morse code to Bar code; he quit his job & developed it in a year!!!

Norman Joseph Woodland (also known as N. Joseph Woodland and N. J. Woodland; September 6, 1921 – December 9, 2012) was best known as one of the inventors of the barcode, for which he received US Patent 2,612,994 in October 1952. Woodland was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 6, 1921 to Jewish parents, the elder of two boys.

After graduating from Atlantic City High School, Woodland went on to earn his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (BSME) from Drexel University (then called Drexel Institute of Technology) in 1947. During his military service in World War II, Woodland worked as a technical assistant with the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. From 1948-1949, he worked as a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Drexel. Read more...

Thursday 4 September 2014

These guys back rubbed incorrectly spelt googol to a mammoth search engine; which began as a project in college!!!


Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. Page and Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually, they changed the name to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word "googol", the number one followed by one hundred zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information. 


Its mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," and its unofficial slogan was "Don't be evil." Originally, Google ran under Stanford University's website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank; it determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.


The domain name for Google was registered on September 15, 1997, and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998. It was based in the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park, California. Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford, was hired as the first employee. The first funding for Google was an August 1998 contribution of US$100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given before Google was incorporated. Early in 1999, while graduate students, Brin and Page decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much time and distracting their academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for US$1 million. He rejected the offer. Read more...

Wednesday 3 September 2014

He discovered Hydra's regenerative properties while teaching students & was connoted as father of biology by some!!!

Abraham Trembley (3 September 1710 – 12 May 1784 Geneva) was a Swiss naturalist. He is best known for being the first to study freshwater polyps or hydra and for being among the first to develop experimental zoology. His mastery of experimental method has led some historians of science to credit him as the "father of biology".

Trembley came from an officer's family from Geneva, Switzerland. Trembley acted as tutor to the children of Count Willem Bentinck (1704-1774), a prominent Dutch politician at the time. Trembley, during his lessons, discovered the regenerative powers of the Hydra with the boys. Those were conducted at the Count's summer residence of Sorgvliet nearby. The Hague. Sketches and drawings of his experiments with the children, made by Cornelis Pronk, are kept in the archives of the town of The Hague, the Netherlands.

Tuesday 2 September 2014

A passionate amatuer painter who coined the word,'mole'; was one of the founders of Modern Physical Chemistry!!!

Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald (2 September 1853 – 4 April 1932) was a Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities. Ostwald, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, and Svante Arrhenius are usually credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.
Ostwald was born ethnically Baltic German in Riga, to master-cooper Gottfried Wilhelm Ostwald (1824–1903) and Elisabeth Leuckel (1824–1903). He was the middle of two brothers, Eugen (1851–1932) and Gottfried (1855–1918). Ostwald graduated from theUniversity of Tartu, Estonia, in 1875, received his Ph.D. there in 1878 under the guidance of Carl Schmidt, and taught at Co-Arc from 1875 to 1881 and at Riga Polytechnicum from 1881 to 1887. Read more...

Monday 1 September 2014

Starting with music, shifting on chemistry & finishing on botany, he pioneered CYCLE OF LIFE concept & researched extensively!!

Sergei Nikolaievich Winogradsky (1 September 1856 – 25 February 1953) was a Ukrainian microbiologist, ecologist and soil scientist who pioneered the cycle of life concept. Winogradsky discovered the first known form of lithotrophy during his research with Beggiatoa in 1887. This research provided the first example of lithotrophy, but not autotrophy. His research on nitrifying bacteria would report the first known form of chemoautotrophy, showing how a lithotroph fixes carbon dioxide (CO2) to make organic compounds.

Winogradsky was born in Kiev (then in the Russian Empire) and entered the Imperial Conservatoire of Music in St Petersburg in 1875 to study piano. However, after two years of music training, he entered the University of Saint Petersburg in 1877 to study chemistry under Nikolai Menshchutkin and botany under Andrei Sergeevich Famintzin. He received a diploma in 1881 and stayed at the St. Petersburg University for a degree of master of science in botany in 1884. Read more...