Over the years, many scientists’ stories have gone untold, and their work is uncredited as others overshadowed them. However, their stories have been resurfacing in recent years, and credit is being given though long overdue.
Julius Robert Mayer: He framed the initial connection between work and energy while serving as a doctor on a merchant ship. It is unfortunate that the report he sent to a scientific journal for publication was messy and lacked structure and was thus rejected by the journal. His second attempt at the paper was accepted in Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie (The Journal for Chemistry and Pharmacy), in which he states that energy, which he referred to as force, is indestructible and transformable – very similar to our current definition of the first law of thermodynamics. A couple of years later, he wrote an improved version of the paper which was, once again, rejected, and so he published it himself. The public entirely ignored it. He nearly lost credit to another scientist – James Prescott Joule – but did receive the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his work – even though it was five years after Joule.
Narender Singh Kapany: Despite being a physicist, farmer, philanthropist, entrepreneur, innovator, and being titled one of the Seven Unsung Heroes of the 20th century for his invention, we rarely hear about this scientist. Known as the ‘Father of fibre optics’, Kapany’s questioning of the conventional concept that light travels in straight lines led to his discovery of fibre optics – the transmission of high-quality images through fibre bundles. He was later posthumously awarded India’s second-highest civilian award – the Padma Vibhushan – in 2021.
Alice Ball: She was the first woman and black Chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii. The African American chemist was also the first to discover a breakthrough in the treatment of Leprosy. Oil from the Chaulmoogra tree alleviates symptoms of the disease (which had no other treatment except isolation); the only problem was that it was difficult to apply and couldn’t be injected since the oil wouldn’t mix with the blood. However, she found a method to break down the oil into ethyl esters and fatty acids so it could be injected. Not long after her discovery, she was killed in a lab accident, and thus her work was continued by the head of her department, Arthur Dean, who published the process under his name – Dean’s Method. However, one of Alice Ball’s co-workers spoke up for her and helped change the name to ‘Ball’s method’, thus gaining her the credit she deserved.
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