Famous Inventors Born in February!

Robert Huber

Date of Birth: February 20, 1937

Notable Works: Huber is a German biochemist who shares the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Johann Deisenhofer and Hartmut Michel for the determination of the structure of the proteins essential for photosynthesis. They isolated the protein that was important to photosynthesis in purple bacteria and used X-ray crystallography to determine its structure. This led to the discovery of similar proteins necessary for photosynthesis in other cyanobacteria.

Carl Henrik Dam

Date of Birth: February 21, 1895

Notable Works: Dam was a Danish biochemist who discovered vitamin K.

Dam was working with chickens to determine if cholesterol is a necessary part of their diet. He fed them chicken feed with all the fat removed. The chickens fell ill and began to hemorrhage internally. When Dam fed the chickens pure cholesterol, their symptoms cleared up. Something in the cholesterol helped the chicken’s blood to coagulate but did not match up with any of the other known vitamins. He called his new coagulation nutrient Koagulations-Vitamin or vitamin K.

Dam would earn half the 1943 Nobel Prize in Medicine for this discovery.

Heinrich Hertz

Date of Birth: February 22, 1886

Notable Works: German physicist who was the first to broadcast and receive radio waves and helped to invent radar technology.

Hertz discovered that an electric current in a conducting wire radiates electromagnetic waves into the surrounding space when swinging rapidly back and forth. Today, we call such a wire an antenna. Hertz went on to detect these oscillations in his lab using an electric spark in which the current oscillates rapidly. These radio waves were first known as “Hertzian waves.” Today we measure frequencies in Hertz (Hz) — oscillations per second –and at radio frequencies in megahertz (MHz).

Casimir Funk

Date of Birth: February 23, 1884

Notable Works: Funk was a Polish biochemist who coined the term ‘vitamine’. He believed there were compounds that were vital to health and were centered around an amine group – vital amines or vitamine. He postulated the existence of vitamins B1, B2, C and D and eventually discovered vitamin B3. Later it was shown that not all vital amines were associated with amines so the final ‘e’ was dropped to just vitamin.

Steve P Jobs

Date of Birth: February 24, 1955

Notable Works: Jobs was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology giant Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Steve is the inventor or co-inventor of patents related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves,  lanyards, and packages. His contributions to most of his patents were to “the look and feel of the product”.

Ida (Tacke) Noddack

Date of Birth: February 25, 1896

Notable Works: Noddack was a German chemist who, with her husband Walter, discovered the element rhenium. Rhenium was the second to last naturally occurring stable element discovered. It was isolated from platinum ore and the mineral columbite. The group announced they had found the element technetium when they bombarded columbite with electrons, but their results were never verified. They named their discovery masurium after the Masuria in Eastern Prussia.

Herbert Henry Dow

Date of Birth: February 26, 1866

Notable Works: Dow was a pioneer in the chemical industry and founder of the Dow Chemical Company, the third largest chemical company in the world.

A graduate of the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, he was a prolific inventor of chemical processes, compounds, and products, notably bromine extraction from seawater, and was a successful businessman.

Dow began his first business extracting useful elements from underground brine. Brine is a solution of mostly salt but contains a wide variety of useful elemental components.

Charles Best

Date of Birth: February 27, 1899

Notable Works: Best was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin.

July 27 marks one of the most important days in diabetes treatment history.  On that date in 1921, Dr. Frederick Banting, a Canadian surgeon and Charles Best, a medical student, successfully isolated the hormone insulin for the first time.  

The breakthrough research took place at the University of Toronto, where Banting and Best successfully isolated insulin from dogs, produced diabetes symptoms in the animals, and then provided insulin injections that produced normal blood glucose levels.

Philip Showalter Hench

Date of Birth: February 28, 1896

Notable Works:

Hench was an American physician who, together with Edward Kendall, started to treat rheumatoid arthritis with the adrenal hormone cortisone. The pair with Tadeus Reichstein investigated further adrenal gland hormones and their effects, earning them the 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Herman Hollerith

Date of Birth: February 29, 1860

Notable Works: Hollerith was an American engineer who developed a machine to tabulate statistical data quickly using cards with holes punched into them, or ‘punch cards’.

The first major use of Hollerith’s tabulation machine and punch card system was the 1890 US Census. The US Constitution requires the government to count every citizen every 10 years to determine the number of representatives and tax appropriation each State receives. This process usually took nearly the entire 10 years to accomplish and each time, the task got bigger.

For the 1890 Census run, they entered the data by punching holes in paper cards. Hollerith’s machines could be configured to count those holes as the cards passed through the machine. It had the bonus of not making mistakes. The entire process was completed in only six years.

Hollerith’s machine was the first to use punch cards to manipulate information. After the success of the 1890 Census, he formed the Tabulating Machine Company. This company was later absorbed into three other companies to form a new company called Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. This company would later be renamed International Business Machines or IBM.