The Stories Behind 8 Common-Science Words

If you know even a small amount of any Romance language, many English words have relatively obvious etymological backgrounds. But the paths to their origins aren’t always so clear when words are eponyms—coined from people’s names—and scientists are very often the culprits in these cases. Here are some words you might not know were eponyms, and whose scientific namesakes have been hiding in plain sight.

1. VOLT

The unit that measures electric potential is named after Count Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist (pictured above) who invented the electrical battery, known as the voltaic pile, in 1800. The volt unit of measurement wasn’t approved by the International Electrical Congress until 1880, however, long after Volta had died. His memory also stuck around in yet another way, at least in Italy: Before the country switched over to the euro, he appeared on the 10,000-lira note.

2. GALVANIZE

Portrait of Luigi Galvani via Wikimedia // Public Domain

Speaking of Volta: He was inspired (or perhaps egged on) in his research by his rival and contemporary physicist Luigi Galvani, who in the 1780s figured out that you can shock dead frogs and make their muscles twitch (he called his discovery “animal electricity”). A variety of words related to electricity were coined in Galvani’s honor, but today the most commonly used in everyday speech is galvanize, meaning to excite someone or something into action.

3. GUILLOTINE

BenP via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.5

Although the guillotine’s prototype was built by French doctor Antoine Louis and German engineer (and harpsichord maker) Tobias Schmidt, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin just, well, really liked it. The idea of a more humane killing machine so impressed the French Revolution-era anatomy professor that he stood before France’s National Assembly in 1789 to recommend it as a much less painful method of execution than the sword, axe, or breaking wheel. The Assembly laughed at him at first, but the lethal device—though first known as aLouison or Louisette (after Dr. Louis)—eventually became an eponym in Guillotin’s honor.

4. MACADAMIA

John Macadam via Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain

Scottish-born John Macadam was a well-respected chemist and politician in his adopted country of Australia, but he didn’t really have anything to do with the indigenous nut that bears his name.

Macadamias were originally called jindilli or gyndl by aboriginal people in Australia, among other names, but they weren’t named or even “discovered” by Europeans—ultimately via explorer Allan Cunningham—until 1828. German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt collected the first specimens in 1843, but it still took until 1858 for German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller to cook up a genus name for the plant. He called it Macadamia after his buddy John, esteemed scientist and secretary to the Philosophical Institute of Victoria.

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