Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor's Earth Shattering Discovery of the Taylor Cone Took Place at Ages 78-83.

Recently, as I noted yesterday in a post in this space, I've been reading about coupled ion mobility spectroscopy and mass spectrometry.

The paper I'm reading has a fascinating discussion of the history of these techniques, and finally, after all these years of seeing the words "Taylor Cone" thrown about without really thinking of what they mean, I decided to look the matter up.

The existence of the "Taylor Cone" is a critical concept in the development of electrospray ionization, for which John Fenn won the Nobel Prize, a technique that, because of its importance in mass spectrometry, has huge, indispensable application in environmental science, drug discovery and development, physiology, materials science, synthetic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, etc., etc.

I ended up at the Wikipedia page of Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor. He was, in fact, a remarkable scientist, a major player in optics, fluid dynamics (including aerodynamics, especially in World War I, were he worked on propeller strength and the development of the parachute, the Manhattan Project as a British representative, particularly on implosion technology, and between the ages of 78 and 83.