Wilfred Gordon Bigelow (1913 - 2005)

Wilfred Gordon “Bill” Bigelow, OC FRSC (June 18, 1913 – March 27, 2005) was a Canadian heart surgeon known for his role in developing the artificial pacemaker and the use of hypothermia in open heart surgery.  Born in Brandon, Manitoba, the son of Dr. Wilfred Abram Bigelow, founder of the first private medical clinic in […]

Mary Ann Bickerdyke (1817 - 1901)

Mary Ann Bickerdyke (July 19, 1817 – November 8, 1901), also known as Mother Bickerdyke, was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War.  She was born in Knox County, Ohio, to Hiram Ball and Annie Rodgers Ball. She later moved to Galesburg, Illinois.  After the outbreak of the Civil War, she […]

Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771 - 1802)

Bichat was born at Thoirette in Jura, France. His father was Jean-Baptise Bichat, a physician who had trained at Montpellier and was Bichat’s first instructor. His mother was Jeanne-Rose Bichat, his father’s wife and cousin. He entered the college of Nantua, and later studied at Lyon. He made rapid progress in mathematics and the physical […]

Dr. Ernest Beutler (1928 - 2008)

Born in Berlin, to a Jewish family, his family home was located on Reichskanzlerplatz, renamed “Adolf Hitler Platz” after Hitler’s ascent to power, and then Theodor Heuss Platz after the Second World War. Both of his parents (Alfred and Kaethe, née Italiener) were physicians. His mother, a pediatrician, was in pre-war times the physician to […]

Daniel Best (1838 - 1923)

In 1839, Daniel Best’s father, John, moved the family to Missouri. There he built a saw mill and proceeded to cut lumber for the local pioneers to use in building their homes. The first nine years of Daniel’s life were spent here and is probably where he received his interest in logging and machines.  In […]

Charles Herbert Best (1899 - 1978)

Born in West Pembroke, Washington County, Maine, he was the son of Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, Canadians from Nova Scotia.  Best married Margaret Hooper Mahon in Toronto in 1924 and they had two sons. One son, Dr. Henry Best was a well-regarded historian who later became president of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. […]

Henry Bessemer (1813 - 1898)

The invention from which Henry Bessemer made his first fortune was a series of six steam-powered machines for making bronze powder, used in the manufacture of gold paint. As he relates in his autobiography, he examined the bronze powder made in Nuremberg which was the only place where it was made at the time. He […]

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779 - 1848)

Born at Väversunda in Östergötland in Sweden, Berzelius lost both his parents at an early age. Relatives in Linköping took care of him, and there he attended the school today known as Katedralskolan. He then enrolled at Uppsala University where he learned the profession of medical doctor from 1796 to 1801; Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, the […]

Marcel Alexandre Bertrand (1847 - 1907)

Marcel Alexandre Bertrand (July 2, 1847 – February 13, 1907) was a French geologist born in Paris. He was the son of mathematician Joseph Louis François Bertrand (1822–1900), and son-in-law to physicist Éleuthère Mascart (1837-1908).  He was a student at the École Polytechnique, and beginning in 1869 he attended the Ecole des Mines de Paris. […]

Joseph Louis François Bertrand (1822 - 1900)

Bertrand was a professor at the École Polytechnique and Collège de France. He was a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences and was its permanent secretary for twenty-six years. He was the son of physician Alexandre Jacques François Bertrand and the brother of archaeologist Alexandre Bertrand. His father died when Joseph was only nine […]

Marcellin Berthelot (1827 - 1907)

The fundamental conception that underlay all Berthelot’s chemical work was that all chemical phenomena depend on the action of physical forces which can be determined and measured. When he began his active career it was generally believed that, although some instances of the synthetic production of organic substances had been observed, on the whole organic […]

Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878)

Bernard was born in 1813 in the village of Saint-Julien near Villefranche-sur-Saône. He received his early education in the Jesuit school of that town, and then proceeded to the college at Lyon, which, however, he soon left to become assistant in a druggist’s shop. Despite having a religious education, Bernard was an agnostic. His leisure […]

Emile Berliner (1851 - 1929)

Berliner was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1851 into a Jewish merchant family. Though raised in a Jewish family, he later became an agnostic. He completed an apprenticeship to become a merchant, as was family tradition. While his real hobby was invention, he worked as an accountant to make ends meet. To avoid being drafted […]

Georgy Timofeyevich Beregovoy (1921 - 1995)

Beregovoy was born on April 15, 1921, in Fedorivka, Poltava Oblast, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). He graduated from a school in 1938 at Yenakieve, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. He joined the Soviet Air Forces (VVS) in 1941, and was soon assigned to a ground-attack unit flying the Ilyushin Il-2 “Shturmovik”. He flew some 185 combat sorties […]

Pavel I. Belyayev (1925 - 1970)

Pavel Belyayev was one of 6 children and was known as Pasha to his family and friends. He was born on 26 June 1925, in Chelishchevo, in what is now Babushkinsky District, Vologda Oblast. In 1932 his family moved to the nearby village of Minkovo. His father was a physician’s assistant and his mother worked […]

Thomas Bell (1792 - 1880)

Bell, like his mother Susan, took a keen interest in natural history which his mother also encouraged in his younger cousin Philip Henry Gosse. Bell left Poole in 1813 for his training as a dental surgeon in London. He combined two careers, becoming Professor of Zoology at King’s College London in 1836 (on the strength […]

Sir Joseph William Bazalgette (1819 - 1891)

Joseph William Bazalgette was born at Hill Lodge, Clay Hill, Enfield, London, the son of Joseph William Bazalgette (1783–1849), a retired Royal Navy captain, and Theresa Philo, née Pilton (1796–1850), and was the grandson of a French Protestant immigrant.  He began his career working on railway projects, articled to noted engineer Sir John MacNeill and […]

Jean Bartik (1924 - 2011)

In 1945, the Army was recruiting math majors for the war effort; her faculty adviser noticed a job advertisement for an Army project in Philadelphia and suggested Bartik apply. She was hired by the University of Pennsylvania to work for Army Ordnance at Aberdeen Proving Ground to calculate ballistics trajectories by hand as a human […]

John Wolfe Barry (1836 - 1918)

Wolfe-Barry was educated at Glenalmond and King’s College London, where he was a pupil of civil engineer Sir John Hawkshaw, as was Henry Marc Brunel, son of the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Barry and Hawkshaw worked on railway bridge crossings across the Thames, among other projects (Brunel pursued his own business from 1871, but in […]

Edward Emerson Barnard (1857 - 1923)

Barnard was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Reuben Barnard and Elizabeth Jane Barnard (née Haywood), and had one brother. His father died three months before his birth, so he grew up in an impoverished family and did not receive much in the way of formal education. His first interest was in the field of photography, […]

John Bardeen (1908 - 1991)

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 23, 1908.  Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison for several years, but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. He graduated from high school at age fifteen, even though he could have graduated several years earlier. His graduation was postponed due to taking […]

Dr. Jose Celso Barbosa (1857 - 1921)

Barbosa (birth name: José Celso Barbosa Alcala) was born in the city of Bayamón, Puerto Rico to parents of African and European ancestry. He received both his primary and secondary education in Puerto Rico. He was the first person of mixed-ethnic ancestry to attend Puerto Rico’s prestigious Jesuit Seminary. After graduating from the Seminary, Barbosa […]

Frederick Banting (1891 - 1941)

Frederick Banting was born on November 14, 1891, in a farm house near Alliston, Ontario. The youngest of five children (Nelson, Thompson, Kenneth and Essie) of William Thompson Banting and Margaret Grant, he attended public and high schools in Alliston. He attempted to enter the army but was refused due to poor eyesight. He then […]

John H. Balsley (1823 - 1895)

John H. Balsley (May 29, 1823 – March 12, 1895) was a master carpenter and inventor, inventing a practical folding wooden stepladder and receiving the first U.S. patent issued for a safety stepladder.  He was born in Connellsville, Fayette County, Pennsylvania to George H. and Sarah (Shallenberger) Balsley. His father was also a carpenter. An […]

Robert C. Baker (1921 - 2006)

A Lansing, New York native, Baker earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1943 and then went on to major in Pomology at the university’s College of Agriculture. For his graduate work, Baker took his master’s degree at Penn State University and his doctorate at Purdue University. Baker was a member of the Alpha […]

Benjamin Baker (1840 - 1907)

He was born in Keyford, which is now part of Frome, Somerset in 1840, educated at Cheltenham Grammar School and, at the age of 16, became an apprentice at Messrs Price and Fox at the Neath Abbey Iron Works. After his apprenticeship he spent two years as an assistant to Mr. W.H. Wilson. Later, he […]

Spencer Fullerton Baird (1823 - 1887)

Spencer Fullerton Baird was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1823. He became a self-trained naturalist as a young man, learning about the field from his brother, William, who was a birder, and the likes of John James Audubon, who instructed Baird on how to draw scientific illustrations of birds. His father was also a big […]

John Logie Baird (1888 - 1946)

Baird was born at 8am on 14 August 1888 in Helensburgh, Argyll and Bute (then Dunbartonshire), and was the youngest of four children of the Reverend John Baird, the Church of Scotland’s minister for the local St Bride’s church and Jessie Morrison Inglis, the orphaned niece of a wealthy family of shipbuilders from Glasgow.  He […]

Sir Donald Coleman Bailey (1901 - 1985)

Bailey attended Rotherham Grammar School and The Leys School in Cambridge and then studied for a period at Sheffield University.  Bailey was a civil servant in the War Office when he designed his bridge. Another engineer, A.M. Hamilton, successfully demonstrated that the Bailey bridge breached a patent on the Callender-Hamilton bridge, though the Bailey bridge […]

Leo Baekeland (1863 - 1944)

Leo Baekeland was born in Ghent, Belgium, Baekeland was the son of a cobbler and a house maid. He told The Literary Digest: “The name is a Dutch word meaning ‘Land of Beacons.’” He graduated with honours from the Ghent Municipal Technical School and was awarded a scholarship by the City of Ghent to study […]