Karl von Frisch

Karl Ritter von Frisch was born in Vienna in 1886 and spent his career studying what honey bees could actually sense and how they behaved. In 1927 he published Aus dem Leben der Bienen, arguing that the waggle dance wasn't random movement but a language - bees were telling each other where to find food. The idea was met with skepticism and dispute from other scientists who found it too odd to believe. Decades passed before the theory was confirmed as accurate. In 1973, long after the initial ridicule, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. He died in 1982, his most controversial insight now textbook fact.