Famous Inventors Born in April!
Explore the famous inventors born in April with IDiyas. From Leonardo da Vinci who was the original “Renaissance Man”, to Wallace Hume Carothers who was credited with the invention of nylon. April has witnessed the birth of numerous influential scientists and inventors who left an indelible mark on history.
Richard Adolf Zsigmondy
April 1, 1865
Zsigmondy was an Austrian-German chemist who was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into colloids. The invented the slit ultramicroscope to aid in his work. The ultramicroscope uses a high contrast background and a very thin beam of light to illuminate colloid particles.
Zsigmondy began his career researching glass and glass coloring. He discovered the method to create Jenaer milchglas or Jenaer milk glass. Milk glass is opaque white colored glass which gets its color from colloid particles added to the molten glass. He also determined colloidal gold is what created the distinctive red coloring in ruby glass and cranberry glass.
Clément Ader
April 2, 1841
Ader was a French engineer and inventor who is best known for making the first powered flight in his Éole aircraft – 13 years before the Wright Brothers’ flight. Ader’s aircraft was a bat-winged plane with a steam-powered 20 horsepower engine. His Éole craft flew on October 8, 1890, when it managed to reach an altitude of 20 centimeters under its own power. His aircraft had no directional controls and the steam engine proved to be a dead end as a power plant for aircraft.
Ader also improved the design of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and established the first telephone exchange in Paris. He invented a device to send stereo sound over telephone lines and transmitted a stereo performance of an opera to another location two miles away.
Jane Goodall
April 3, 1934
Goodall is an English anthropologist who is best known for her study of chimpanzee society and family structures in Tanzania over the course of 45 years. She discovered chimpanzees construct and use tools where it was believed before only humans make tools.
Goodall became active with conservation by establishing the Jane Goodall Institute as an effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. The Institute has expanded to 19 locations around the world with programs concerning community-level conservation and development.
Zénobe-Théophile Gramme
April 4, 1826
Gramme was a Belgian electrical engineer who invented the Gramme dynamo. The Gramme dynamo was the first large-scale direct current (DC) generator used for commercial purposes. Gramme later discovered that his dynamo would act as an electric motor when connected to an electric current and would supply useful amounts of torque. These motors were the beginning of industrial electric motor use.
Dr. Hattie Alexander
April 5, 1901
When Dr. Alexander began researching Haemophilus influenzae in 1940, children infected with this form of meningitis invariably died. She developed a serum and treatment which greatly impacted the mortality rate of the condition. Her early results lowered the mortality from nearly 100% to around 20%.
She also discovered the bacteria showed evidence of evolving to form resistance to the antibiotics used against it. This led her to the field of microbial genetics and discoveries of DNA controlling the disease producing traits of bacteria.
Dr. Alexander served as the first woman president of the American Pediatric Society in 1965.
James Dewey Watson
April 6, 1928
Watson is an American biologist who is best known for discovering the structure of DNA with Francis Krick. He was awarded one-third of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in this research. He also helped establish the Human Genome Project with the National Institute of Health.
Francesco Selmi
April 7, 1817
Selmi was an Italian chemist who is considered one of the founders of colloid chemistry and forensic chemistry.
Selmi’s research looked into the behavior of silver chloride, prussian blue, and some sulfur compounds in colloid solutions. He described the difference between “true solutions” and “pseudo-solutions” of compound mixtures.
Selmi was also distinctive in introducing the term “ptomaine” to toxicology. Today, ptomaine poisoning is just food poisoning caused by bacterial exposure. In Selmi’s time, a person was listed as “poisoned” if any poisonous substances were found in their entrails after death. Selmi believed this to not be necessarily a guarantee of poisoning just because something toxic was found in the body. He showed a cadaver would produce “ptomaìne” or toxins if left alone long enough. This research led to his appointment as head of a newly created branch of the Ministry of Justice which dealt with forensic sciences.
Harvey Cushing
April 8, 1869
Cushing was a pioneer in modern brain surgery techniques. He was one of those people that seemed to excel at anything they try. He incorporated new science discoveries into his own research: x-rays to detect tumors and new electrical cauterizers. He made discoveries into human sensory cortex and pituitary gland diseases. He even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for a biography of William Osler, the doctor considered to be the father of modern medicine.
Presper Eckert
April 9, 1919
Eckert was an American engineer who co-invented with John Mauchly the first general-purpose electronic digital computer and the first commercial electronic computer.
The two men met at the Moore School of Engineering during World War II and pitched the idea to the Army. The Army funded their program if they would build them a machine to calculate artillery firing solutions. Army artillery used tables of precalculated solutions based on a number of variables such as the type of projectile, weather conditions, propellant charges, and angles of elevation.
The machine they built was called ENIAC or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC could compute firing solutions in less than a minute what the human calculators did in a day. It consisted of 20 different banks of components, each able to store a single 10 digit number. The programming was done through patch cords and an IBM punch card reader provided input and output. The entire setup filled a room measuring 20 feet by 40 feet (6 m by 12 m).
J. Presper Eckert could easily be considered one of the fathers of the Information Age.
John Leslie
April 10, 1766
Leslie was a Scottish mathematician and physicist best known for his work on heat transfer and heat radiation.
One of the most striking demonstrations he created is known as a Leslie cube. With this apparatus, Leslie showed the differences in the heat radiating from the cube on the different sides. The most heat radiated from the blackened surface while the least heat radiated from the polished side.
Most of his heat research dealt with heat and moisture. He is credited with inventing several meteorological instruments such as a differential thermometer (useful to measure small temperature changes), a wet bulb and dry bulb hydrometer (to measure dew point depression), a hygroscope (device to measure humidity in air), and an atmometer (device to measure rates of evaporation). It was from this research that Leslie became the first person to artificially produce water ice. He accomplished this feat using an air pump system which effectively worked the same way refrigeration systems work to this day.
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About The Author
Angelina Kushnarova
Angelina Kushnarova (Sverediuk) was born in Ukraine. She graduated from Ternopil Medical University with a specialization in Medicine and completed an internship in Radiology at Lviv University. She worked as a Radiologist, while also working as a web developer.