Famous Inventors Born in June!

Oliver Joseph Lodge

Date of Birth: June 12, 1851

English radio pioneer who invented spark plugs.

He identified electromagnetic radiation  independent of Hertz’s proof. At his 1894 Royal Institution lectures (“The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors”), Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the “coherer”. In 1898, the United States Patent Office awarded him the “syntonic” (or tuning) patent. 

E. Cuyler Hammond

Date of Birth: June 14, 1912

Scientist who was the first to prove that smoking causes lung cancer.

In 1952, Hammond published an early report linking cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Two years later he published the initial findings of a study of 180,000 men which confirmed the high risk of death from all causes as a result of smoking cigarettes. Later research demonstrated a link between smoking cigarettes and cancers other than lung cancer. The research also showed a decreased risk of cancer after people stopped smoking and a relationship between cigarette smoking and cancer in women. To develop on his 1952 conclusions, he helped to establish in 1959 a force of more than 60,000 volunteers who worked for the American Cancer Society to gather data on the smoking habits of more than 1 million Americans.

Burt Rutan

Date of Birth: June 17, 1943

American aerospace engineer who invented the light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient Voyager aircraft, the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling.

He also designed the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, which in 2006 set the world record for the fastest (342 mph/551 km/h in 67 hours) and longest (25,766 miles/41,466 km) nonstop non-refueled circumnavigation flight in history. 

Alan Turing

Date of Birth: June 23, 1912

Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.

Walther Hermann Nernst

Date of Birth: June 25, 1864

German physical chemist and physicist who is known for his theories behind the calculation of chemical affinity as embodied in the third law of thermodynamics, and for developing the Nernst equation (Nobel Prize, 1920)

Emil Erlenmeyer

Date of Birth: June 28, 1825

Mr. Erlenmeyer was a German chemist known for contributing to the early development of the theory of structure, formulating the Erlenmeyer rule, and designing the Erlenmeyer flask, a type of specialized flask, ubiquitous in chemistry laboratories, which is named after him.