Famous Inventors Born in August

Steve Wozniak

Date of Birth: August 11, 1950

Profession: American electronics engineer, computer scientist

Notable Works: In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his late business partner Steve Jobs, which later became the world’s largest technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalization. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Grace Murray Hopper Award (1979); National Inventors Hall of Fame (2000).

John Logie Baird

Date of Birth: August 13, 1888

Profession: Scottish inventor

Notable Works:  The innovator who demonstrated the world’s first live working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Member of the Physical Society (1927); Member of the Television Society (1927); Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1937).

Salvador E. Luria

Date of Birth: August 13, 1912

Profession: Italian microbiologist

Notable Works: He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969, with Max Delbrück and Alfred Hershey, for their discoveries on the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses. Salvador Luria also showed that bacterial resistance to viruses (phages) is genetically inherited

Prestigious Honours and Awards: The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1942);
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1969);
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1969).

Frederick Sanger

Date of Birth: August 13, 1918

Profession: English biochemist

Notable Works: He won the 1958 Chemistry Prize for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin and numerous other proteins, demonstrating in the process that each had a unique, definite structure; this was a foundational discovery for the central dogma of molecular biology. Also, he developed and subsequently refined the first-ever DNA sequencing technique, which vastly expanded the number of feasible experiments in molecular biology and remains in widespread use today.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1958); Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (1967); Royal Medal (1969); Gairdner Foundation International Award (1971); William Bate Hardy Prize (1976); Copley Medal (1977); Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1979); Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1980).

Bion Joseph Arnold 

Date of Birth: August 14, 1861 

Profession: American engineer.

Notable Works: He is remembered as the “father of the third rail“, a pioneer in electrical engineering, and an urban mass transportation expert. In 1898, Arnold developed a new method of converting alternating current from power plants to direct current in substations for the Chicago & Milwaukee Electric Railway. This innovative electrification system would eventually become a standard in the interurban and street railway industries. Between 1898 and 1912, he assisted the New York Central Railroad and the Hudson River Railroad in conversion of their lines leading into Grand Central Terminal.