Carl Anderson and the positron
Amid all the revolutionary discoveries and ludicrous ideas of the early 1930s, not everyone was looking at dirt and air to unlock the secrets of nature; some people, following Hess’ example, chose to lift their gaze from their busy notebooks and look at the sky. Carl Anderson was one of those individuals. In 1932, Anderson was studying cosmic radiation; he now had access to a tool that Hess wasn’t able to bring on his balloon: the cloud chamber. Using this simple device and a magnet, Anderson found evidence of a particle that had the same mass as an electron but would divert in the opposite direction than an electron under a magnetic field. He had discovered the positron, the first anti-matter particle ever observed—proving the reality of anti-matter that Paul Dirac had suggested with his famous unification equation in 1928.
Source: Anderson, C. D. The Positive Electron. Phys. Rev. 43, 491–494 (1933).
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!