Vocation : Science : Physics

Louis Henri Frédéric Melsens (11 July 1814 in Leuven – 20 April 1886 in Brussels) was a Belgian physicist and chemist. In 1846, he became professor of chemistry at the Royal Veterinary School of Cureghem in Anderlecht, Brussels. Melsens applied the principle of the Faraday cage to lightning conductors and invented tincture of iodine for disinfection. In medical circles he became internationally famous for his research on oral administration of potassium iodide as a cure for mercury or lead poisoning.

Max Jakob (July 20, 1879 – January 4, 1955) was a German physicist known for his work in the field of thermal science.
Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Jakob studied engineering at Technical University Munich, from which he graduated in 1903. From 1903 to 1906, he was an assistant to O. Knoblauch at the Laboratory for Technical Physics. In 1910, Jakob embarked on a 25-year career at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt in Charlottenburg, Berlin. During this time he founded and directed applied thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow laboratories.Fleeing Nazi persecution, Jakob left Germany in 1936 and immigrated to the United States, where he became a professor at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) and a consultant in heat transfer for Armour Research Foundation. There he conducted research, covering areas such as steam and air at high pressure, devices for measuring thermal conductivity, the mechanisms of boiling and condensation, and flow in pipes and nozzles.His many years of teaching, consulting, and writing resulted in contributions to the literature of the profession; nearly 500 books, articles, reviews and discussions have been published based on his research. He has published a number of books in thermal sciences including Elements of Heat Transfer and Insulation (1942) and Heat Transfer (1956).
He is credited with devising the Jakob dimensionless number, aka Jakob number, which is used in phase change heat transfer calculations:

J
a
=

c

p
,
f

(

T

w

−

T

s
a
t

)

h

f
g

{\displaystyle Ja={\frac {c_{p,f}(T_{w}-T_{sat})}{h_{fg}}}}

The Max Jakob Memorial Award, the highest honor in the field of heat transfer, was established in 1961 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Heat Transfer Division in honor of Jakob.

Archibald "Archie" Howie (born 8 March 1934) is a British physicist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge, known for his pioneering work on the interpretation of transmission electron microscope images of crystals. Born in 1934, he attended Kirkcaldy High School and the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently took up a permanent post. He has been a fellow of Churchill College since its foundation, and was President of its Senior Combination Room (SCR) until 2010.
In 1965, with Hirsch, Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson, he published the seminal text Electron Microscopy of Thin Crystals. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1978 and awarded their Royal Medal in 1999. In 1992 he was awarded the Guthrie Medal and Prize. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1995. He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1989 to 1997.

Robert B. Goldschmidt (1877–1935) was a Belgian chemist, physicist, and engineer who first proposed the idea of standardized microfiche (microfilm).
Goldschmidt was a polymath who also made advances in aviation and radio, among other fields. In 1913 he constructed a major radio facility at Laeken, Belgium, where in 1914 he and Raymond Braillard inaugurated Europe's first regular radio concert broadcasts. He was also a participant in the first and second international Solvay Conferences reviewing outstanding issues in chemistry and physics.

Bernard d'Espagnat (22 August 1921 – 1 August 2015) was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality. Wigner-d'Espagnat inequality is partially named after him.
Quote: "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."

Georges Augustin Albert Charpy (1 September 1865 – 25 November 1945) was the French scientist who created the Charpy impact test. He attended École Polytechnique from 1885 to 1887 and graduated with a degree in Marine Artillery. In 1887 he became a professor at École Monge. In 1892 he published his physics thesis. In 1920 he became a professor of metallurgy at École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris. In 1922 he became the professor of general chemistry at École Polytechnique.

Louis Marcel Brillouin (French pronunciation: [lwi maʁsɛl bʁijwɛ̃]; 19 December 1854 – 16 June 1948) was a French physicist and mathematician.
Born in Saint-Martin-lès-Melle, Deux-Sèvres, France, his father was a painter who moved to Paris when Marcel was a boy. There he attended the Lycée Condorcet. The Brillouin family returned to Saint-Martin-lès-Melle during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to escape the fighting. There he spent time teaching himself from his grandfather's philosophy books. After the war, he returned to Paris and entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1874 and graduated in 1878. He became a physics assistant to Éleuthère Mascart (his future father-in-law) at the Collège de France, while at the same time working for his doctorates in mathematics and physics, which he gained in 1880 and 1882, respectively. Brillouin then held successive posts as assistant professor of physics at universities in Nancy, Dijon and Toulouse before returning to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1888. Later, he was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Collège de France from 1900 to retirement in 1931.
In 1911 he was one of only six French physicists invited to the first Solvay Conference. He was awarded the Prix La Caze for 1912.
Brillouin was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1921. He was an officer of the Legion of Honour.During his career he was the author of over 200 experimental and theoretic papers on a wide range of topics which include the kinetic theory of gases, viscosity, thermodynamics, electricity, and the physics of melting conditions. Most notably he:

built a new model of the Eötvös balance,
wrote on Helmholtz flow and the stability of aircraft,
worked on a theory of the tides.Brillouin died in Paris (16 June 1948). His son Léon Brillouin, also had a prominent career in physics.

Louis François Clément Breguet (22 December 1804 – 27 October 1883), was a French physicist and watchmaker, noted for his work in the early days of telegraphy.
Educated in Switzerland, Breguet was the grandson of Abraham-Louis Breguet, founder of the watch manufacturing company Breguet. He became manager of Breguet et Fils watchmakers in 1833 after his father Louis Antoine Breguet retired.
Between 1835 and 1840 he standardized the company product line of watches, then making 350 watches per year, and diversified into scientific instruments, electrical devices, recording instruments, an electric thermometer, telegraph instruments and electrically synchronized clocks. With Alphonse Foy, in 1842 he developed the Foy-Breguet telegraph, an electrical needle telegraph to replace the optical telegraph system then in use. and a later step-by-step telegraph system (1847) was applied to French railways and exported to Japan. He observed in 1847 that small wires could be used to protect telegraph installations from lightning, the ancestor of the fuse.
In 1850 he manufactured a rotating mirror used by Hippolyte Fizeau to measure the relative speed of light in air and water.: 129  In 1856 he designed a public network of synchronized electric clocks for the center of Lyon. In 1866 he patented an electric clock controlled by a 100 Hz tuning fork.In 1870 he transferred the leadership of the company to Edward Brown. Breguet then focused entirely on the telegraph and the nascent field of telecommunications. He collaborated in the development of an induction coil, later improved by Heinrich Ruhmkorff.
In terms of honors, in 1843 he was appointed to the Bureau of Longitudes. In 1845 Breguet was awarded the Legion d'Honneur. He was made a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1874, and was elevated to Officer of the Legion d'Honneur in 1877. He is one of the 72 French scientists whose names are written around the base of the Eiffel Tower.Breguet was married and had one son Antoine (1851–1882) who also joined the family electrical business. With his son, he met Alexander Graham Bell and obtained a license to manufacture Bell telephones for the French market. He was the grandfather of Louis Charles Breguet and the uncle of Sophie Berthelot.

Joseph Valentin Boussinesq (pronounced [ʒɔzɛf valɑ̃tɛ̃ businɛsk]; 13 March 1842 – 19 February 1929) was a French mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to the theory of hydrodynamics, vibration, light, and heat.