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Millennium Essay
Nature 407, 947 (26 October 2000) | doi:10.1038/35039642
High achiever
Mott T. Greene1
Between 1900 and 1905 the theories of quantum mechanics, special relativity and radioactive transmutation were born, and the atomic theory of matter was confirmed. These events so dominate historical accounts of the period that other breakthroughs languish in obscurity, among them the discovery of the stratosphere in 1902 by the independent French scientist Léon Teisserenc de Bort (1855– 1913) — one of the most overlooked events in the history of science.
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