physics

Hennig Brand was a 17th-century alchemist who spent both his wives' fortunes chasing gold. In 1669, he collected 1,500 gallons of urine, let it rot, then boiled it down and heated the paste for weeks. What came out wasn't gold — it was a waxy substance that glowed in the dark and burst into flames on its own. He'd discovered phosphorus, the first element ever isolated by a named individual. He went looking for gold in the most preposterous place imaginable and found light instead.

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote put carbon dioxide in a glass cylinder, set it in the sun, and discovered it traps heat. She wrote it up. Three years later, a man published similar findings with better equipment and became the father of climate science. Her paper was read aloud by a man because women weren't allowed to present. Then her name vanished from the literature entirely — until 2010, when a geologist found her paper and noticed the experiments had been conducted "by a lady."

Émilie du Châtelet translated Newton's *Principia* into French — still the standard translation nearly three centuries later. She funded her work by applying probability theory to gambling. At forty-two, pregnant and knowing the odds, she raced to finish the manuscript before childbirth. She won the race. She died six days after delivery. The translation outlived her by centuries.

Maxwell's equations appear on every physics classroom wall — four elegant lines describing light, electricity, and magnetism. Maxwell didn't write them that way. His original was twenty equations, nearly unreadable. A self-taught telegraph operator named Oliver Heaviside compressed them into the form we use today. He also invented operational calculus decades early, predicted the ionosphere, and spent his final years alone in Torquay, furniture replaced with granite blocks, fingernails painted cherry-pink, signing his name as a worm. The equations never changed.

Tesla invented AC power and held 300 patents. He also required exactly 18 napkins per meal, walked around blocks three times, and loved a white pigeon. When she died, he knew he was done. He was right.