1878 — Alexander du Toit, Champion of Continental Drift

On March 14, 1878, Alexander du Toit was born in Newlands, Cape Town, the geologist who gave science the map that proved continents move. When the world laughed at continental drift, he crossed the Atlantic on a Carnegie grant and found the same fossil sequences in South America and southern Africa.

His 1937 book, Our Wandering Continents, argued the supercontinent Pangaea had split into Laurasia and Gondwanaland. It was the groundwork of plate tectonics, decades ahead of its time. A scientist from Cape Town, mocked for an impossible idea, had read the stones on two continents and seen that they once were one.