Naming rights: how to stake a claim in the dictionary of science

In 1582, when all the studies and analyses were complete, Pope Gregory deleted the offending ten days from the calendar, declaring the day after October 4 to be October 15. The Church also initiated a further adjustment: omitting the leap day every century year that is not evenly divisible by 400, thus correcting for the Julian calendar's overcorrecting leap day itself.

This new "Gregorian calendar" was further refined in the twentieth century to become even more precise, preserving the accuracy of your wall calendar for tens of thousands of years to come. Nobody else had ever kept time with such precision. Enemy states of the Catholic Church (such as Protestant England and its rebellious progeny, the American colonies) were slow to adopt the change, but eventually everyone in the modern world, including cultures that have traditionally relied on Moon-based calendars, has adopted the Gregorian calendar as the standard for international business, finance, and politics.

Ever since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, European contributions to science and technology have become so embedded in Western culture that it may now take a special effort to notice them at all. The Industrial Revolution was a breakthrough in our understanding of energy, enabling engineers to dream up way. s to convert it from one form to another. In the end, the revolution would replace human power with machine power, drastically enhancing the productivity of nations and the subsequent distribution of wealth around the world.

The language of energy is rich with the names of scientists who contributed to the effort. James Watt, the Scots inventor who perfected the steam engine in 1765, has the moniker best known outside the circles of engineering and science. Either his last name or its initial gets stamped on the top of practically every lightbulb. A bulb's wattage measures the rate of its energy consumption, which correlates with its brightness. Watt made his famous contribution while repairing a steam engine at the University of Glasgow, which was, at the time, one of the world's most fertile centers for engineering innovation.

The English physicist Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831, which enabled him to construct the first electric motor. The farad, a measure of a device's capacity to store electric charge, probably doesn't do full justice to his contributions to science.

The German physicist Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves in 1888, opening the door to communication via radio; his name survives as the unit of frequency, along with its metric derivatives: kilohertz, megahertz, and gigahertz.

From the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta we have the volt, a unit of electric potential. From the French physicist Andre-Marie Ampere we have the unit of electric current known as the ampere, or "amp" for short. From the British physicist James Prescott Joule we have the joule, a unit of energy. The list goes on and on.