Charles Édouard Guillaume

Charles-Édouard Guillaume was a Swiss physicist working in the fine margins where temperature warps metal and ruins measurements. On 15 February 1861 he was born; by 1919 he was delivering the fifth Guthrie Lecture at the Institute of Physics in London on "The Anomaly of the Nickel-Steels." The anomaly was this: nickel steel alloys behaved wrongly, expanding far less with heat than theory predicted. That wrongness turned useful - clocks, instruments, standards could now hold steady across temperature swings. In 1920 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the service he had rendered to precision measurements by discovering it. He died 13 June 1938, having spent a career noticing what didn't behave and turning the exception into the rule.