Science & Invention

The Big Bang theory, the saxophone, Bakelite, the World Wide Web’s European home — Belgian minds that reshaped the world.

Part of Belgium

22 moments in this segment.

1. 1543-01-01 — Vesalius — Modern Anatomy. Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 "De humani corporis fabrica" founded modern human anatomy.
2. 1569-01-01 — Mercator’s Projection. Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 map projection still shapes how the world pictures itself.
3. 1570-01-01 — Ortelius — The First Atlas. Antwerp’s Abraham Ortelius compiled the first modern world atlas in 1570.
4. 1576-01-01 — The Plantin Press. Antwerp’s great Renaissance printing house — now the UNESCO Plantin-Moretus Museum.
5. 1585-01-01 — Simon Stevin. The Bruges mathematician who introduced decimal fractions to Europe — a Renaissance polymath.
6. 1832-01-01 — Joseph Plateau. The Ghent physicist whose phenakistiscope made images move — a grandfather of cinema.
7. 1835-01-01 — Quetelet & the "Average Man". Adolphe Quetelet of Brussels founded social statistics and gave us the Body Mass Index.
8. 1846-01-01 — Adolphe Sax & the Saxophone. Dinant’s Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone in 1846 — the instrument that defined jazz.
9. 1863-01-01 — Ernest Solvay. The soda-ash industrialist whose fortune funded the legendary Solvay physics conferences.
10. 1865-01-01 — Kekulé’s Benzene Ring. The Ghent-professor dream of a snake biting its tail — the structure of benzene.
11. 1871-01-01 — Zénobe Gramme’s Dynamo. The Belgian inventor whose 1871 dynamo made practical electric power generation possible.
12. 1900-01-01 — The Antwerp Diamond District. For centuries the world’s diamond-trading heart — a square kilometre that cut most of history’s gems.
13. 1900-01-01 — The Antwerp Port. One of the world’s great ports and Europe’s petrochemical engine — Belgian industry at planetary scale.
14. 1907-01-01 — Bakelite — The First Plastic. Leo Baekeland’s 1907 invention of Bakelite launched the age of plastics.
15. 1927-01-01 — The Solvay Conferences. Brussels, 1927: the most famous photograph in physics — Einstein, Curie, Bohr and the birth of quantum theory.
16. 1927-01-01 — Georges Lemaître — The Big Bang. The Belgian priest-physicist who first proposed the expanding universe and the "primeval atom".
17. 1938-01-01 — Corneille Heymans — Nobel Medicine. The Ghent physiologist who won the 1938 Nobel for discovering how the body senses blood oxygen.
18. 1957-01-01 — Paul-Henri Spaak. The Belgian statesman called a "founding father of Europe" — first president of the UN General Assembly.
19. 1958-01-01 — Dominique Pire — Nobel Peace. The Belgian Dominican friar who won the 1958 Nobel Peace Prize for aiding post-war refugees.
20. 1977-01-01 — Ilya Prigogine — Nobel Chemistry. The Brussels chemist whose work on dissipative structures won the 1977 Nobel.
21. 1989-01-01 — Belgian Minds at CERN. The continent’s great physics laboratory, where the Web was born — Belgian science woven into European big science.
22. 2013-01-01 — François Englert — Higgs Boson. The Brussels physicist who shared the 2013 Nobel for predicting the Higgs boson.