A meteorologist proposed the continents were drifting — and was mocked for decades

In 1912, Alfred Wegener noticed the coastlines of Africa and South America fit together like puzzle pieces, and pointed to matching fossils and rock strata across oceans. Geologists dismissed him — he wasn't one of them, and he had no mechanism to explain it. Plate tectonics vindicated him, but only after his death.

— Alfred Wegener, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans) — 1915
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