Famous Inventors Born in August

Ernest Everett Just

Date of Birth: August 14, 1883 

Profession: African-American biologist,  academic.

Notable Works: A zoologist who specialized in cytology (the study of the cell), is best known for his contributions to marine biology. While on the faculty of Howard University, he spent summers as a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he did significant research on the fertilization of eggs of marine mammals. His studies of fertilization and the fundamental role of the cell surface in the development of organisms won international acclaim.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Spingarn Medal (1915).

Elias Magnus Fries

Date of Birth: August 15, 1794

Profession: Swedish mycologist and botanist.

Notable Works: Fries invented the system a mycologic. He also developed a system for classifying lichens based on the characteristics of their fruiting bodies (the organs that produce reproductive spores). This system, presented in his Lichenographia Europaea Reformata (1831), was widely accepted until the use of the microscope revolutionized knowledge in this field. Fries was the first person to distinguish between lichens with external coverings on the fruiting body and those without.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Louis Victor Pierre Raymond

Date of Birth: August 15, 1892

Profession: French physicist 

Notable Works: In his 1924 Ph.D. thesis, he postulated the wave nature of electrons and suggested that all matter has wave properties. This concept is known as the de Broglie hypothesis, an example of wave–particle duality, and forms a central part of the theory of quantum mechanics.

De Broglie won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929 after the wave-like behaviour of matter was first experimentally demonstrated in 1927.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Nobel Prize in Physics (1929); Henri Poincaré Medal (1929); Albert I of Monaco Prize (1932); Max Planck Medal (1938); Kalinga Prize (1952).

Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann

Date of Birth: August 16, 1845 

Profession: Franco-Luxembourgish  physicist and inventor

Notable Works: One of Lippmann’s early discoveries was the relationship between electrical and capillary phenomena which allowed him to develop a sensitive capillary electrometer, subsequently known as the Lippmann electrometer which was used in the first ECG machine. Lippmann is remembered as the inventor of a method for reproducing colours by photography, based on the interference phenomenon, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908.

Prestigious Honours and Awards: Nobel Prize for Physics (1908).

Philo Taylor Farnsworth

Date of Birth: August 19, 1906

Profession: American inventor and television pioneer.

Notable Works: He made many crucial contributions to the early development of all-electronic television. Farnsworth is best known for his 1927 invention of the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), the image dissector, as well as the first fully functional and complete all-electronic television system.

In later life, Philo invented a small nuclear fusion device, the Farnsworth Fusor, employing inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC). Like many fusion devices, it was not a practical device for generating nuclear power, although it provides a viable source of neutrons. Farnsworth held 300 patents, mostly in radio and television.