On this date in 1842, John William Strutt was born in Essex, England. It is by his hereditary title as 3rd Baron Rayleigh that he is most well known and by which his contributions to science are usually referred. Rayleigh primarily studied acoustics and developed the duplex theory for how humans are able to localize sound. He also predicted the existence of surface waves in solids and explained the the scattering of light that results in the sky being blue. Working with William Ramsey, he isolated argon, a discovery which won them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904.
