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 prec…