Famous Inventors Born in April!
Percy Lavon Julian
April 11, 1899
Percy Julian was an American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine and was a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry’s production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.
He received more than 130 chemical patents. He was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist inducted (after David Blackwell) from any field
Otto Fritz Meyerhof
April 12, 1884
Meyerhof was a German biochemist who was awarded half the 1922 Nobel Prize in Medicine for describing the way muscle tissue absorbs oxygen and converts it to lactic acid. He discovered glycogen is converted into lactic acid when the muscle contracts. His research led the way to a more detailed explanation of the path from glycogen to lactic acid known as the Embden-Meyerhof pathway.
James Wimshurst
April 13, 1832
James was an English inventor, engineer and shipwright. Though Wimshurst did not patent his machines and the various improvements that he made to them, his refinements to the electrostatic generator led to its becoming widely known as the Wimshurst machine.
The device had two disks turning in opposite directions, with metallic conducting sectors on the surfaces of each. Compared to its predecessors, this machine was less sensitive to atmospheric conditions and did not require an electric power supply. In 1882, Wimshurst developed his “Cylindrical Machine”. By 1883, his improvements to the electrostatic generator led to the device being widely known as the Wimshurst machine. In 1885, one of the largest Wimshurst machines was built in England (and is now at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry).
Alan G MacDiarmid
April 14, 1927
MacDiarmid was a New Zealand chemist who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Alan Heeger and Hideki Shirakawa for discovering a method to create conductive polymers. Conductive polymers are organic polymers that are modified to conduct electricity and are used as anti-static material and in battery technologies.
Leonardo da Vinci.
April 15, 1452
Leonardo da Vinci was an artist, musician, scientist, engineer, inventor, anatomist, and writer.
As an artist, he is best known for his paintings. He painted the most famous portrait in history, the Mona Lisa. He painted one of the most famous religious painting, the Last Supper. The drawing of the proportions of the human body known as the Vitruvian Man is considered a cultural icon.
As an anatomist, he dissected corpses at a local hospital to learn how people are put together. He compiled 240 detailed drawings to accompany a treatise of over 13,000 words detailing what he found. Many of his illustrations show how the muscles attach to the skeletal system and the forces they apply to move the different parts.
As an engineer and inventor, Leonardo designed a wide variety of projects. He constructed siege works for cities and planned a bridge to span the Bosporus in Constantinople. His notes contained designs for flying machines, weapons, parachutes, hydraulic pumps, mechanical men, and musical instruments.
He gained a lot of fame during his lifetime. He was even lured to the French court by Francis I with the promise of support and a place to live for the rest of his life. Even today, 500 years after his death, people line up for hours just to glimpse the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
Wilbur Wright
April 16, 1867
Wilber was the elder of the Wright brothers who were the first to accomplish controlled and sustained powered flight. Their aircraft used three axes of control to maintain steady flight: pitch, yaw, and roll which is the standard control for planes to this day.
Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran
April 18, 1838
Lecoq was a French chemist who used Kirchhoff’s spectroscopy techniques to discover the elements gallium, samarium, and dysprosium.
Lecoq found the first of Mendeleev’s predicted elements, eka-aluminum. He named this element gallium. Some believed he named this element after himself since “gallus” is Latin for “le coq” (rooster). He later tried to clarify in an article the name came from the Latin name of Gaul: Gallus.
Glenn T. Seaborg
April 19, 1912
Seaborg was an American chemist who discovered ten of the transuranium elements and over 100 different isotopes. Seaborg also proposed the actinide group arrangement for the periodic table.
These elements were plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106. Element 106 was named seaborgium in 1997 in his honor. He shares the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Edwin McMillan for these discoveries.
These elements were all created at the University of California, Berkeley’s radiation laboratory. They accelerated protons, alpha particles (helium nuclei) and element nuclei with their cyclotron at various high atomic number targets in the hope of these particles being forced into the nucleus of the target. This technique is the basis for creating the elements found at the upper end of the periodic table.
Kai Manne Börje Siegbahn
April 20, 1918
Siegbahn was a Swedish physicist who was awarded half the 1981 Nobel Prize in physics for the developing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. This technique detects the elemental composition of a sample by irradiating it with x-rays and measuring the energy of what is knocked loose. His father, Karl Siegbahn was awarded the 1924 Nobel Prize in Physics for x-ray spectroscopy.
February 28, 2023, Weekly Utility Patent Insights
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Inventor Recognitions with Centurion Plus Utility Patents as of March 28, 2023
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.