Jean-Charles Peltier
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The clockmaker who found in 1834 that passing current through a junction of two dissimilar metals heats one side and cools the other, depending on direction.
He was a watchmaker who retired at thirty to do science, and what he found is the only way to move heat with no moving parts and no working fluid. It stayed a curiosity for about 120 years, because it needs semiconductors to be efficient enough to matter - which makes it a clean case of a correct discovery waiting for a material that did not exist yet. The devices built on it now hold laser temperatures steady inside optical transceivers, so a discovery from 1834 is what keeps a wavelength where the specification says it should be.
Also known as: peltier, peltier effect, thermoelectric cooling
Sources
- Britannica: Peltier, born 22 February 1785 and died 27 October 1845, a clockmaker who retired at thirty to devote himself to scientific investigation, discovered in 1834 that at the junction of two dissimilar metals a current produces heat or cold depending on its direction
- The Peltier effect discovered in 1834, eight years after Seebeck published the converse effect; practical thermoelectric devices became feasible only after mid-twentieth-century advances in semiconductors