Scientists knew that DNA existed long before James Watson and Francis Crick were on the scene. But they didn’t know how it was constructed, and without that knowledge molecular biology couldn’t move forward. In the early 1950s, the two Cambridge scientists set about trying to figure it out, using stick and ball models to test their ideas. In 1953 they finally cracked it, coming up with the famous double-helix shape now familiar to us all. According to Watson’s biography, Crick announced their ‘get in’ moment by walking into the nearby Eagle pub and declaring, “We have found the secret of life.”
Can we imagine what our wardrobes would look like without jeans? When Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss came to patent them in 1873, blue denim had been used as work wear for a long time. But Davis, a tailor by trade, was looking for a means to reinforce denim trousers to make them more durable. His solution was to put copper rivets at the points where the trousers were most likely to tear, like the pockets. To help fund the idea he got in touch with the successful wholesaler Strauss and the ubiquitous ‘denim pants’ were born.
Tim Berners Lee was a physicist turned software engineer. In the 1980s, he was working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. It was here that he described the idea of a global system, based on the concept of ‘hypertext’, which would enable researchers to share information no matter where they were in the world. By the end of the decade, he’d found a way to combine his hypertext idea with the internet. He called it the World Wide Web. You may have heard of it...
On 15th December 2015, Tim Peake could have been forgiven for taking his hands off the controls of the Soyuz rocket launching him towards the International Space Station to indulge in a discrete fist pump. Not only had he beaten over 8,000 other applicants to take part in the European Space Agency astronaut training programme in the first place, six years later he would go on to become the first UK-funded astronaut in space, the first Brit to space walk outside the ISS and the first man to run a marathon in space, doing it on a treadmill the same day as the London Marathon took place.
Chances are you’ve probably never heard of Norman Borlaug, but he should be a household name. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, was part of the first Green Revolution and went on to become known as ‘The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives.’ Borlaug was a brilliant biologist, and spent much of his career pondering ways in which agricultural development might stop famine. So he set about creating a type of wheat resilient in difficult climatic conditions, disease-resistant and high-yielding. Introduced to parts of Asia and Africa that had suffered terrible famine, the wheat flourished. As a consequence, millions of lives and the lives of future generations were no longer threatened by starvation.
In the mid-1990s, Joanne Rowling saw herself as a failure. She was a single parent, didn’t have a job and was just about scraping by on welfare benefits. But Rowling had one thing going for her – she’d just finished writing a children’s story about a boy attending a school for wizards, for which she’d managed to find an agent. But after that agent sent the manuscript to 12 publishers and every one rejected it, hope seemed lost. That was until the daughter of a publisher read the first chapter and loved it, prompting the offer of a £1,500 advance. Six sequels later and the Harry Potter books have sold over 400 million copies. It’s enough to make you believe in magic.
Football songs were a staple of the 70s and 80s, particular for England about to embark on a major tournament. They all had one thing in common �� they were dreadful, at least until New Order’s World in Motion bucked the trend in Italia 90. For Euro 96 in England, comedians Baddiel and Skinner joined forces with songwriter Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds to give the football song another go, creating the catchy Three Lions. But it wasn’t until 80,000 England fans began chanting ‘Football’s coming home’ after England beat Scotland 2-0, that it dawned on them just how much people had taken the song to their hearts.
Without longitude, navigation at sea would be impossible over long distances. Calculating longitude was considered so important that in 1714, the British parliament offered £20,000 to the person who could solve the problem – nearly £3million in today’s money. But when John Harrison, a self-educated carpenter and clockmaker, invented a timepiece that did solve the problem, they refused to pay up, saying his success had been down to luck. So Harrison enlisted the help of King George III, eventually getting his money, and in the process establishing the Greenwich Meridian, the standard by which the whole modern world measure time and distance.