Famous Inventors Born in August

We are introducing the famous inventors born in August. From the birth of the American billionaire Sergey Brin best known for co-founding Google to that of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who are an inspiration to all of us never to stop dreaming and work hard. Find out who shares your August birthday below.

Sir Alexander Fleming

Date of Birth: August 6, 1881

Profession: Inventor, Physician, Bacteriologist, Pharmacologist.

Notable Works: Sir Fleming was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world’s first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 of what was later named benzylpenicillin from the mould Penicillium rubens is described as the “single greatest victory ever achieved over disease.”

Prestigious Honours and Awards: For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. FRS (1943); Knight Bachelor (1944); Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh (1945).

Sergey Brin

Date of Birth: August 21, 1973

Profession: Inventor, Computer scientist

Notable Works: Brin is an American billionaire business magnate, a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. Brin is the President of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc..

As of June 2023, Brin is the 9th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $107 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Elisha Gray

Date of Birth: August 2, 1835

Profession: American electrical engineer

Notable Works: Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, IL. He is also considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer. In 1865, Gray invented a self-adjusting telegraph relay that automatically adapted to varying insulation of the telegraph line. In 1867 Gray received a patent for the invention, the first of more than seventy.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Elliott Cresson Medal (1897).

Koichi Tanaka

Date of Birth: August 3, 1959

Profession: Japanese electrical engineer

Notable Works: He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich (the latter for work in NMR spectroscopy).

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2002); Order of Culture (2002);
Person of Cultural Merit (2002).

Nicolas-Jacques Conté 

Date of Birth: August 4, 1755

Profession: French painter, inventor  

Notable Works: Conté had the idea of mixing powdered graphite with clay and pressing the material between two half-cylinders of wood. Thus was formed the modern pencil. Conté received a patent for the invention in 1795 and formed la Société Conté to make them. He also invented the conté crayon named after him, a hard pastel stick used by artists.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: At the 1798 Exposition des produits de l’industrie française Conté won an honourable distinction, the highest award, for his “crayons of various colours”.