What Did the Belgians Do for Us? Quiz

Answer: Leo Baekeland

Leo Baekeland (1863-1944) was born in Ghent and studied chemistry at the Ghent university. In 1889 he started on a world trip to various research institutes, but professor Chandler of Columbia University convinced Baekeland to stay in New York and start his own researches. Baekeland then came up with photographic paper (named Velox), sold in 1899 to Eastman Kodak.
In a next step, Baekeland investigated the properties of phenol and formaldehyde, and found that combining these two products under specific conditions of heat and pressure would result in a series of synthetic resins with the formula (C6H6O-CH2O)n, with quite desirable properties. The Bakelite (as Baekeland called this new product) is smooth, resistant to heat, to scratching, to electricity and to some destructive solvents. And even better: it could be made easily in large quantities. Up till the late 1940s Bakelite was used in so many applications one could not count them. Starting with the fifties, cheaper plastics became available and gradually replaced much of the Bakelite.
Belpaire (1820-1893) was a Belgian engineer specialised in train locomotives.
Vierendeel (1852-1940) was a Belgian engineer and bridge builder.
Waterkeyn (1917-2005), another engineer, was born in England, but had Belgian nationality. He designed the monument named the Atomium for the Brussels World Expo in 1958.

Answer: Jules Bordet

Believe it or not, but all four these Belgians won the Nobel Prize for Physiology (Medicine).
Bordet (1870-1961) worked on immunology. In 1906 he isolated the bacteria responsible for causing whooping cough, which bacteria was named Bordetella pertussis in his honour. Six years later Bordet and Octave Gengou (1875-1957) made the first vaccine available to the public. In 1919 Bordet won the Nobel Prize for his various discoveries in human immunology.
Corneille Heymans (1892-1968) dedicated his research chemical receptors in the blood measuring the blood pressure and the oxygen dose. He won the Nobel Prize in 1938.
De Duve (1917-2013) and Claude (1899-1983) worked closely together with the Romanian doctor George Emil Palade (1912-2008). The three of them shared the Nobel Prize 1974 for their discoveries in cellular biology.

Answer: Printing

Philippus Brepols (1778-1845) was an apprentice of the printer Pieter Corbeels. When Corbeels was executed by the French in 1798, Brepols took gradually control of the Corbeels print factory in Turnhout and eventually changed the company name to his own.
The Brepols company was famous for missals and breviaries during the nineteenth century, and for diaries and agendas during the twentieth century. It started also a venture in printing playing cards, nowadays known under the company name Carta Mundi - one of the largest in the production of playing cards and games.
The Belgian contribution to photography was started by Lieven Gevaert (1868-1935), founder of the Gevaert group (nowadays Agfa-Gevaert).
Edouard Empain (1852-1929) started his career in metallurgy, but soon invested in railways all over the world, including tramways in Paris, in Russia and in Egypt.
Goerges Jacobs (born 1940) started his career as an economist with the International Monetary Fund. Since 1970 he is one of the big shots at UCB, one of the leading Belgian groups in biopharmaceutics. He also is member of the board of directors of several other Belgian companies.

Answer: Lucas Fayd'Herbe

The tomb situated in the Sint-Rombouts cathedral in Mechelen shows us two types of statues made by Fayd'herbe: the usual Baroque style influenced by Rubens' paintings, and a more expressive style with greater emphasis on the vertical axis of the statue.
Fayd'herbe (1617-1697) was born into a family of artists. His maternal grandfather and two of his uncles were renowned painters, and his aunt and father taught him the basis of sculpture. Fayd'herbe was an apprentice of Rubens for three years, and then settled himself in Mechelen. He worked in Mechelen, Brussels, and other Belgian cities. He created at least eight altars and several tomb monuments. Fayd'herbe also worked as an architect, for instance for the Basilica of Hanswijk in Mechelen.
Meunier (1831-1905) was a painter and sculptor most interested by the common people: factory workers, miners, dockers...
Minne (1866-1941) is best known for his "Fountain of Kneeling Youths".
Claerhout (1939-2016) worked in bronze and in terracotta, with a style influenced by folklore.

Answer: True

Yes indeed, and his name was André Grétry.
Grétry (1741-1813) was a choirboy in Liège during his teens, and he went to many performances of the Italian Baroque composers such as Baldassare Galuppi and Giovanni Batista Pergolesi.
In 1759 Grétry composed a mass for the canons of Liège Cathedral, and this became the basis to fund a trip to Italy to complete his musical education. In 1767 he settled in Paris, and henceforth worked only in France. His best known works include "Zémire et Azor" (1771) and "Richard Coeur de Lion" (1784).
Grétry was born in what nowadays is a main city in Belgium, but he adopted French nationality after settling in Paris. After his death, his body was buried at Père Lachaise, but his heart was sent to Liège to be buried under a statue erected in his honour.

Answer: Art Nouveau

Victor Horta (1861-1947) was born in Ghent and worked mostly in Brussels. Four of his Brussels houses have been classified in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list: the Hotel Tassel, the Hotel Solvay, the Hotel Van Eetvelde and the Maison & Atelier Horta.
Horta was one of the pioneers in the Art Nouveau style, which peaked between 1890 and 1910. Art Nouveau was popular in the Benelux and France, whereas in Austria-Hungary the somewhat similar Wiener Sezession and in Germany the very similar Jugendstil prevailed in the same period. In architecture, Art Nouveau was characterized by many decorations on the outside of a building, based upon elegant examples from nature (flowers, birds, butterflies).
The neoclassical style builds upon the classical (renaissance) style, which in turn is based upon the style introduced by the ancient Greeks and Romans. In architecture neoclassicism favours symmetrical buildings with emphasis on the horizontal lines. A Belgian architect who worked primarily in the neoclassical style was Alphonse Balat (1818-1895).
Constructivism combines state-of-the-art technology with abstract objects. One of the Belgian constructivist architects was Renaat Braem (1910-2001).
Gothic architecture stresses vertical lines. Typical examples are the cathedrals built in the years c. 1150-1500. Rombout II Keldermans (1460-1531) was one of several Gothic architects and artists from the same family.

Answer: John Joseph Merlin

Merlin (1735-1803) was born in Huy, a city between Brussels and Liège. Although most of his inventions now are obsolete, he amazed the world with them at the end of the eighteenth century.
The invention that still is sold under the name Merlin, is the inline roller skate. Sources differ as to the date of the invention: some name 1743 as the invention date, others name 1760.
Merlin also created clocks, music boxes, a self-propelled wheelchair, a rotating tea table, and improved musical instruments such as the harpsichord.
Daemen (born 1965) and Rijmen (born 1970) are cryptographers who together created the Rijndael cypher, named the Advanced Encryption Standard in 2001. Bart Preneel (born 1963) is another Belgian cryptographer.

Answer: Adolphe Quetelet

The Body Mass Index (BMI) is calculated as the weight of a person (in kilograms) divided by the square of the body length (in metres). This BMI is also called the Quetelet Index.
Quetelet (1796-1894) was born in Ghent. He was active as mathematician, statistician, astronomer and sociologist, and he gave the impetus to found the Meteorological Institute in Uccle (near Brussels).
Daubechies (born 1954) worked on wavelets in compressed images.
Deligne (born 1944) was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978 and the Abel Prize in 2013. His mathematical works include proof on the Weill conjectures (a subject only accessible to trained mathematicians).
Tilly (1837-1906) worked on non-Euclidian mechanics (for instance the mechanics involved in the surface of a sphere).

Answer: Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens was born in Siegen (nowadays Germany) in 1577 to Antwerp parents. After studying in Italy between 1600 and 1608, he returned to Belgium and stayed there until his death in 1640.
Rubens has left at least 1,400 artworks, of which maybe a hundred are quite famous. The majority of his large paintings have religious or mythological themes, such as "The Three Graces" (1635, Prado) and the "Assumption of the Virgin" (1626).
Many of the paintings by Rubens give the impression of strong movement. For instance in the "Assumption" one can see putti pushing upwards the cloud on which sits the virgin Mary, on her way to heaven. The movement is even more stressed by the character to the left, lifting his arms towards Mary.
Another typical aspect of Rubens' paintings is the rotundness of the female characters (especially the nudes). This characteristic has been named "Rubenesque". Nowadays one would call these characters full-bodied, but medical students would give them the epithet "obese". Personally I prefer the Rubenesque women to the modern fashion models.

Answer: Andreas Vesalius

Andries van Wesel (1514-1564) Latinised his name to Andreas Vesalius. Born in Brussels, he studied in Louvain, Paris and Padua. Unlike his predecessors in anatomy, he did not follow the books of Galen blindly, but sought to confirm or falsify Galen's theories by dissecting real fresh bodies (usually those of criminals just executed). In Venice Vesalius found a very good illustrator, the German Jan van Calcar, and together they published between 1543 and 1555 the ground-breaking work on anatomy: "De humani corporis fabrica libri septem" ("Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body").
Dodoens (1517-1585) was a famous botanist, known for his "Cruydeboeck" (herbarium).
Lipsius (1547-1606) was a philosopher and philologist.
De Geer (1587-1652) was born in Liège, but soon moved first to Dordrecht (nowadays in the Netherlands), then to La Rochelle (France), back north to Amsterdam and finally to a small town in Sweden. He made his fortune in the metal industry, especially for building cannons and the like.