Categories: Inventors

Famous Inventors Born in April!

Percy W. Bridgman

April 21, 1882

Bridgman was an American physicist known for his work in high-pressure physics.

Bridgman began his career studying the effects of high pressure on matter as a professor at Harvard. During a repair of his equipment, he came up with an idea to improve the seal around the sample area. His idea proved to be a good one since it greatly improved the efficiency of the device. His press could compress his samples on the order of 10 Gigapascals (≈ 1.5 million PSI).

These pressures opened a whole new avenue of research. He cataloged physical properties like compressibility, thermal conductivity, tensile strength and viscosity of over 100 different compounds. He also discovered when a current passes through a crystal and encounters a different crystal orientation, heat is produced. This effect is known as the Bridgman effect. This discovery and the invention of his press earned him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Rita Levi-Montalcini

April 22, 1909.

Nerve growth factor (NGF)

Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurologist who made several discoveries of how cells divide and form new cells with different functionality.

Levi-Montalcini began her career in science wanting to be a doctor. She graduated with an M.D. from the University of Turin in 1936 and took a position as a research assistant studying the development of the nervous system. This position did not last long after Mussolini passed laws prohibiting Jews from academic and professional careers. Instead of working at the University, she set up her own laboratory in her bedroom studying nerve cell development in chicken embryos.

After the war, she got a research fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. She reproduced her chicken embryo experiments and struck up a relationship with the university that would last 30 years. During this time, one of her experiments involved transferring tumors to chick embryos and noticing how quickly the nerve fibers grew around the tumors. This led her to the discovery and isolation of the nerve growth factor NGF. This discovery would lead to other growth factor discoveries and helped scientists gain an understanding of medical problems such as cancer, deformities, and dementia. It also earned her half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

April 23, 1858

Max was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.

Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory, which revolutionized understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. He is known for Planck’s constant, which is of foundational importance for quantum physics, and which he used to derive a set of units, today called Planck units, expressed only in terms of fundamental physical constants.

Edmund Cartwright

April 24, 1743

Ropemaking machine.

In 1784, Cartwright was inspired to create a machine for weaving after he visited inventor Richard Arkwright’s cotton-spinning mills in Derbyshire. Although he had no experience in this field and many people thought his ideas were nonsense, Cartwright, with the help of a carpenter, worked to bring his concept to fruition. Edmund completed the design for his first power loom in 1784 and won a patent for the invention in 1785.

Although this initial design was not successful, Cartwright continued to make improvements to subsequent iterations of his power loom until he had developed a productive machine. He then established a factory in Doncaster to mass produce the devices. However, Cartwright had no experience or knowledge in business or industry so he was never able to successfully market his power looms and primarily used his factory to test new inventions. Edmund invented a wool-combing machine in 1789 and continued to improve his power loom. He secured another patent for a weaving invention in 1792.

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli

25 April 1900

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his “decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle”. The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.

Sir Owen Willans Richardson

April 26, 1879

Sir Richardson was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1928 for his work on thermionic emission, which led to Richardson’s law.

He also researched the photoelectric effect, the gyromagnetic effect, the emission of electrons by chemical reactions, soft X-rays, and the spectrum of hydrogen.

Wallace Hume Carothers

April 27, 1896

Mr. Carothers was an American chemist, inventor, and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont, who was credited with the invention of nylon.

Carothers was a group leader at the DuPont Experimental Station laboratory, near Wilmington, Delaware, where most polymer research was done. Carothers was an organic chemist who, in addition to first developing nylon, also helped lay the groundwork for neoprene. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught at several universities before he was hired by DuPont to work on fundamental research.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss

30 April 1777

Mr. Gauss was a German mathematician, astronomer, geodesist, and physicist who made contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Gauss ranks among history’s most influential mathematicians and has been referred to as the “Prince of Mathematicians”. He was director of the Göttingen Observatory and professor at the university for nearly half a century, from 1807 until his death in 1855.

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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.