Famous Inventors Born in February!

Emilio Segre

Date of Birth: February 1, 1905 

Profession: Italian physicist

Notable Works: Segré discovered the first artificial element. Emilio won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959 along with Owen Chamberlain for his discovery of elements technetium and astatine, and the antiproton, a subatomic antiparticle.

The antiproton is a proton with a negative charge, much like the positron is an electron with a positive charge. Its existence was predicted by Paul Dirac in 1933, but the energy needed to produce them was not available.

Jean Baptiste Boussingault

Date of Birth: February 2, 1802

Profession: French chemist

Notable Works: Jean determined the role of nitrogen in plant health. He made one of the first scientific studies of the practice of crop rotation. Boussingault found plants get nitrogen from the soil in the form of nitrates. He also found legume crops added nitrogen to the soil.

Boussingault isolated the compound sorbitol. Sorbitol is a slow metabolizing sugar alcohol generally used as a sugar substitute in low-calorie foods.

Elizabeth Blackwell

Date of Birth: February 3, 1821

Profession: British physician

Notable Works: Blackwell was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. She encouraged other women to become doctors and was active in the Woman’s Suffrage movement.

In 1868, Blackwell opened a medical college in New York City. She also helped found the National Health Society and published several books, including an autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895).

Friedrich Hund

Date of Birth: February 4, 1896

Profession: German physicist

Notable Works: Hund was best known for Hund’s Rule.

Hund’s Rule is a method to determine the electron structure within atoms and molecular bonds at the valence energy level. Once the inner electron levels are full, the leftover electrons distribute themselves in the valence shell by the spin quantum number.

He also discovered the principle of quantum tunnelling. Quantum tunnelling is the quantum effect where a particle passes through, or ‘tunnels’ through an energy barrier where under classical mechanics, the particle could not overcome.

John Boyd Dunlop 

Date of Birth: February 5, 1840 

Profession: Scottish inventor 

Notable Works: Thomson invented the first vulcanized rubber pneumatic (inflatable) tire. Thomson patented his pneumatic tire in 1845.

Familiar with making rubber devices, he invented the first practical pneumatic tyres for his child’s tricycle and developed them for use in cycle racing.

William Parry Murphy

Date of Birth: February 6, 1892

Profession: American physician

Notable Works: Murphy shares the 1934 Noble Prize in Medicine with George Minot and George Whipple for their work on the treatment of anemia. Whipple showed that anemic dogs who were fed liver improved their condition, actually reversing the condition. Minot and Murphy used this research to successful treat pernicious anemia.

Ulf von Euler 

Date of Birth: February 7, 1905

Profession: Swedish physiologist and pharmacologist.

Notable Works: Ulf von Euler shared the 1970 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Bernard Katz and Julius Axelrod for their work with neural transmitters.

Euler was researching the role of noradrenaline in biological and neural tissues. He discovered it was produced and stored in nerve synaptic terminals.

Dmitri Mendeleev

Date of Birth: February 8, 1834

Notable Works: Mendeleev is best known for formulating the Periodic Law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the Periodic Law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet to be discovered (germanium, gallium and scandium).

Jacques Monod

Date of Birth: February 9, 1910

Profession: French biologist

Notable Works: Monod shares the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with François Jacob and André Lwoff for discoveries about the genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.

Monod and Jacob became famous for their work on the E. coli lac operon, which encodes proteins necessary for the transport and breakdown of the sugar lactose (lac). From their work and the work of others, they came up with a model for how the levels of some proteins in a cell are controlled. This was the first case of a transcriptional regulation system.

John Franklin Enders 

Date of Birth: February 10, 1897

Profession: American microbiologist

Notable Works: Enders has been called “The Father of Modern Vaccines.”

Enders shares the 1954 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins for their work with the poliomyelitis virus which causes polio.

They discovered a means to grow the virus in a medium other than the nervous fibers it naturally infects. This allowed more of the virus to be produced at a time in controlled environments. This made it much easier to make an effective vaccine. They used these methods later with the virus that causes measles that led to a vaccine.