Famous Inventors Born in August

William Bateson

Date of Birth: August 8, 1926

Profession: English biologist 

Notable Works: Bateson first suggested using the word “genetics” (from the Greek gennō,  γεννώ; “to give birth”) to describe the study of inheritance. He co-discovered genetic linkage with Reginald Punnett and Edith Saunders, and he and Punnett founded the Journal of Genetics in 1910. Bateson also coined the term “epistasis” to describe the genetic interaction of two independent loci.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Royal Medal (1920).

Ernest Orlando Lawrence

Date of Birth: August 8, 1901

Profession: American nuclear physicist

Notable Works: Ernest Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cyclotron, a circular device capable of accelerating nuclear particles to extremely high speeds without the use of high voltage. Small enough to hold in his hands, the original cyclotron ushered in the era of giant “atom smashers” housed under domes at Berkeley Lab and at particle physics laboratories around the world, furthering the fields of experimentation and discovery at the sub-atomic level.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Elliott Cresson Medal and the Hughes Medal in 1937, the Comstock Prize in Physics in 1938, the Duddell Medal and Prize in 1940, the Holley Medal in 1942, the Medal for Merit in 1946, the William Procter Prize in 1951, Faraday Medal in 1952, and the Enrico Fermi Award from the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957. 

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac

Date of Birth: August 8, 1902

Profession: English theoretical physicist

Notable Works: Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Nobel Prize in Physics (1933); Royal Medal (1939); Copley Medal (1952); Max Planck Medal (1952); Fellow of the Royal Society (1930).

William T. G. Morton

Date of Birth: August 9, 1819 

Profession: American dentist and physician

Notable Works: He first publicly demonstrated the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic in 1846. In 1852 Morton was granted an honorary doctorate by Washington University in Baltimore. Morton received a patent for ether in the US, which was later revoked, and never received any royalties. He spent his declining years in an attempt to persuade Congress to provide him compensation for his discovery, but this never arrived.

Marvin Lee Minsky 

Date of Birth: August 9, 1927

Profession: American cognitive and computer scientist 

Notable Works: He is concerned largely with the research of artificial intelligence (AI), is co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy. Minsky’s inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope. He developed, with Seymour Papert, the first Logo “turtle“. Minsky also built, in 1951, the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC. In 1962, Minsky worked on small universal Turing machines and published his well-known 7-state, 4-symbol machine.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Turing Award (1969); Japan Prize (1990); AAAI Fellow (1990); IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1991); Benjamin Franklin Medal (2001); BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2013).