Which scientist proposed continental drift in 1912?

Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist rather than a geologist, which is part of why he was dismissed. He assembled the evidence properly - the fit of the coastlines, matching rock formations across the Atlantic, identical fossils of animals that could not have swum, and glacial deposits in places now tropical - and it added up.

What he could not supply was a mechanism. His suggestion that continents ploughed through the ocean floor was physically impossible, and geologists said so, with some hostility. He died in 1930 on the Greenland ice sheet, on an expedition to resupply a stranded team, at fifty - decades before he was vindicated.

The vindication came from the sea floor in the 1950s and 60s. Magnetic surveys found stripes of alternating polarity running parallel to the mid-ocean ridges and mirrored perfectly on both sides - the record of new crust forming and locking in the Earth's magnetic field as it cooled, then splitting and moving apart. The continents were not ploughing anywhere; they were passengers on plates. Wegener had the observation right and the explanation wrong, and it is one of the cleaner cases of a field being correct to reject an argument and wrong about the conclusion.