Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who died in 1680 and was born on 2 May in either 1601 or 1602, a date he did not know himself. He published around 40 major works on comparative religion, geology and medicine and has been compared with Leonardo da Vinci and called the Master of a Hundred Arts. For more than 40 years he taught at the Roman College, where he set up a cabinet of curiosities that became the Kircherian Museum. His work in geology included studies of volcanoes and fossils, and he was one of the first researchers to observe microbes through a microscope, proposing that plague was caused by an infectious microorganism. He claimed to have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, but most of his translations proved wrong, although he correctly established the link between ancient Egyptian and Coptic. Inventions attributed to him include a magnetic clock, various automatons and the first megaphone.