I suspect that if most people were asked to name the scientist of note from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they would think of Galileo. But there is another who profoundly inf luenced even that great man: William Gilbert.
We don’t know much about Gilbert’s early life, although he was born in 1544 and the preferred spelling of his family name was Gilberd. After studying at the grammar school in Colchester, he went on to Cambridge, and there are some accounts of him studying at Oxford as well. He obtained a medical degree, travelled in Europe, and then settled in London in around 1573 where he made a name for himself in his chosen profession. He became so well known that he was appointed Court Physician to Elizabeth I. He was also interested in natural science and although he at first studied alchemy, he soon abandoned it for physics.
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