Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher taught for over forty years at the Roman College, where he built a cabinet of curiosities that became the Kircherian Museum and earned the title "Master of a Hundred Arts". His hieroglyphic translations turned out to be incorrect, but he correctly linked ancient Egyptian to Coptic and is considered by some the founder of Egyptology. He wrote an encyclopedia of China revealing early Nestorian Christians, studied volcanoes and fossils, observed microbes through a microscope, and proposed that plague spread through infectious microorganisms. Credited with inventing a magnetic clock, automatons, and the first megaphone, he was eclipsed late in life by Descartes and the new rationalism. Centuries later his work found fresh admirers: "a giant among seventeenth-century scholars," "the last Renaissance man," a champion of wonder whose ideas seem wildly off-base but whose erudition was read by the smartest minds of the time.