Famous Inventors Born in December!

Explore the famous inventors born in December with IDiyas. From Charles Edgar Duryea, who built the first auto in the United States, to Asa Griggs Candler Sr., who founded Coca-Cola, December has witnessed the birth of numerous influential scientists and inventors who left an indelible mark on history. Read further to discover what famous inventor has the same December birthday

Martin Heinrich Klaproth 

Date of Birth: December 1, 1743

Profession: German chemist

Notable Works: Klaproth was a major figure in understanding the composition of minerals and characterizing the elements. Martin discovered uranium (1789) and zirconium (1789). He was also involved in the discovery or co-discovery of titanium (1792), strontium (1793),  cerium (1803), and chromium (1797) and confirmed the previous discoveries of tellurium (1798) and beryllium.

Martin Rodbell 

Date of Birth: December 1, 1925

Profession: American biochemist  

Notable Works: Rodbell shares the 1994 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Alfred Gilman for their discovery of G-proteins and their role in signal transduction within the cell. G-proteins are a family of proteins that work as switches and intermediaries between guanosine diphosphate (GDP) and guanosine triphosphate (GTP) to regulate downstream cell processes.

George Richards Minot

Date of Birth: December 2, 1885

Profession: American physician

Notable Works: Minot shares the 1934 Nobel Prize in Medicine with George Whipple and William Murphy for their research into anemia and liver therapy. Whipple had shown that pernicious anemia in dogs could be treated by feeding them raw liver. Minot prepared liver extracts that became the primary treatment for human anemia until the vital compound in the liver was identified as vitamin B₁₂.

Paul Jozef Crutzen 

Date of Birth: December 3, 1933

Profession: Dutch chemist

Notable Works: Crutzen shares the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina for their research on the ozone layer. Rowland and Maria discovered that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were a major contributor to the destruction of ozone in the atmosphere. Crutzen’s demonstrated the effect nitrous oxide had on the depletion of ozone. Nitrous oxide is largely unreactive and could rise high into the atmosphere and interact with ultraviolet light.

Richard Kuhn

Date of Birth: December 3, 1900

Profession: German biochemist

Notable Works: Kuhn was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into carotenoids and vitamins. Carotenoids are the organic pigments in plant cells created by algae or bacteria. Kuhn discovered, purified and determined the composition of eight of these compounds. He also isolated vitamins B₆ and B₁₂.

 Ellen Swallow Richards

Date of Birth: December 3, 1842

Profession: American chemist

Notable Works: Ellen pioneered a Home Economics study in the United States. She was also the first woman to be admitted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was America’s first woman to hold a degree in Chemistry and would later become MIT’s first female instructor.

Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn

Date of Birth: December 3, 1886

Profession: Swedish physicist

Notable Works: Karl was awarded the 1924 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on X-ray spectroscopy. He discovered the M series of x-ray spectral lines and demonstrated the shell nature of atomic electrons. He also demonstrated the refraction of x-rays through prisms to illustrate their wave nature.

Cleveland Abbe

Date of Birth: December 3, 1838

Profession: American meteorologist 

Notable Works: Abbe divided the country into four time zones to keep the timekeeping between weather stations consistent. He managed to convince the railroad companies to adopt this same time system since they shared Western Union’s telegraph network. These time zones were formally adopted in 1884. Abbe established a network of weather stations connected by telegraph to make daily weather reports and issue weather alerts. This system was expanded when he became the first head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, forerunner of the National Weather Service.

Werner Heisenberg

Date of Birth: December 5, 1901 

Profession: German physicist 

Notable Works: Werner is best known for the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle is one of the main differences between the study of classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics, a physical quantity can be simultaneously assigned to any particle. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle states the more closely you measure the momentum of a particle, the less certain you can measure the position.

Sheldon Lee Glashow 

Date of Birth: December 5, 1932

Profession: American physicist

Notable Works: Sheldon shares the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg for their contributions to electroweak theory. The electroweak theory was formed to unify the forces of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear forces associated with radioactivity. Salam and Weinberg outlined a theory that could only be applied to leptons, but Glashow discovered a way to expand the theory to include other elementary particles by inventing a new property for quarks called ‘charm’.