# The 11 Most Important Scientific Experiments in History

> Kites, gold foil, X-ray film and one contaminated dish nobody meant to leave out.

*By YPB Team · Published August 11, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-11-most-important-scientific-experiments-in-history*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Franklin's Kite Experiment**
   In June 1752 Franklin drew electrical charge from a storm cloud and proved lightning was electricity.
2. **Rutherford's Gold Foil Experiment**
   Alpha particles bouncing off gold foil in 1909 revealed the atomic nucleus.
3. **The Michelson-Morley Experiment**
   Its failure to find the ether in 1887 cleared the road to special relativity.
4. **Galileo's Inclined Plane**
   Rolling balls down a ramp gave the first quantitative law of falling bodies.
5. **Pasteur's Swan-Neck Flasks**
   Sterile broth that stayed sterile ended the idea of spontaneous generation.
6. **Fleming's Penicillin Dish**
   A contaminated culture plate in 1928 became the first antibiotic.
7. **Photo 51**
   Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction image gave away the double helix of DNA.
8. **Cavendish's Torsion Balance**
   Weighed the Earth in 1798 by measuring the gravitational pull between lead spheres.
9. **The Meselson-Stahl Experiment**
   Showed in 1958 how DNA copies itself, one old strand per new molecule.
10. **Eddington's Eclipse Observation**
   The 1919 eclipse showed starlight bending around the Sun, confirming general relativity.
11. **Newton's Prism Experiment**
   Split white light into a spectrum and recombined it, founding modern optics.

Tags: science, classics