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Wilson, Benjamin

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Benjamin, 1721–88, English portrait painter and electrician who opposed Benjamin Franklin's theory of positive and negative electricity. Instead, Wilson supported Newton's gravitational-opti...

Wilson, William Bauchop

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, William Bauchop, 1862–1934, American labor leader, U.S. Secretary of Labor (1913–21), b. Blantyre, Scotland. Coming as a child to the United States in 1870, he worked in Pennsylvania coal ...

Wilson, Mount

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Mount, peak, 5,710 ft (1,740 m) high, S Calif., in the San Gabriel Mts., NE of Pasadena. It is the site of Mt. Wilson Observatory (est. 1904), one of the Hale Observatories. A 100-in. (254-cm)...

Wilson, Robert Woodrow

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Robert Woodrow, 1936–, American radio astronomer, b. Houston, Tex., Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, 1962. In 1964 he and co-researcher Arno Penzias began monitoring radio waves in ...

Wilson, Colin

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Colin, 1931–2013, English writer, b. Leicester. Born into a working-class family and largely self-educated, Wilson in many of his books exhorts humankind to expand its powers and realize its...

Wilson, Jack

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Jack: see Wovoka.

Wilson, Richard

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Richard, 1713?–1782, British landscape painter, b. Wales. He studied in London and achieved success as a portrait painter, but after a visit to Italy (c.1750–1756) he devoted himself to la...

Wilson, Edward Osborne

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Edward Osborne, 1929–2021, American sociobiologist, b. Birmingham, Ala., Univ. of Alabama (B.S., 1949; M.S.,1950), Harvard Univ (Ph.D., 1955)....

Wilson, Henry Maitland Wilson, 1st Baron

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Henry Maitland Wilson, 1st Baron, 1881–1964, British field marshal. He served in the South African War and World War I and in 1939 became commander of the British forces in Egypt. He led the...

Wilson, Edmund Beecher

(Encyclopedia)Wilson, Edmund Beecher, 1856–1939, American zoologist, b. Geneva, Ill., grad. Yale (Ph.B., 1878), Johns Hopkins (Ph.D., 1881). He taught at Bryn Mawr (1885–91) and at Columbia (1891–1928), where...