Famous Inventors Born in March!

Walter Gilbert

Date of Birth: March 21, 1932

Notable Works: Gilbert is an American biochemist who shares half the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Fredrick Sanger for developing methods to find the nucleotide sequence order for nucleic acids. He also developed the equilibrium dialysis technique to determine the ion bonding of proteins.

Friedrich Wilhelm August Argelander

Date of Birth: March 22, 1799

Notable Works: Argelander was a German astronomer who pioneered the research of variable stars and developed the methods used to identify them. He also developed a method of quickly identifying the brightness and position of stars that allowed him to catalogue over 324,000 individual stars. This catalogue, the Bonner Durschmusterung, was compiled with Adalbert Krüger and Eduard Schönfeld and was the last to be published without the use of photography.

Daniel Bovet

Date of Birth: March 23, 1907

Notable Works: Blovet was an Italian biologist who was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the invention of drugs that block the actions of specific neurotransmitters. He discovered antihistamine drugs that block the histamine neurotransmitter used widely as allergy medications.

Adolf Butenandt

Date of Birth: March 24, 1903

Notable Works: Butenandt was a German biochemist who was awarded half the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research of sex hormones. He discovered the hormone estrone from the secretions from ovaries responsible for the sexual development of females. He was also the first to isolate the male hormone androsterone. The Nazi government forced Butenandt to refuse his Nobel Prize, but he would eventually receive his award after the end of the War.

Benjamin Thompson

Date of Birth: March 26, 1753

Notable Works: Thompson was a British physicist who made significant contributions to early thermodynamics. He determined a method to measure the specific heat of solids independently of Johan Wilcke. He also related mechanical work with heat.

Thompson introduced the unit of light called ‘candle’. It was equivalent to the brightness of a candle. Today, the SI unit of luminosity is the candela. One candle = 0.981 candelas.

Wilhelm Röntgen

Date of Birth: March 27, 1845

Notable Works: Röntgen was a German physicist who was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of Röntgen rays, or as he called them: x-rays.

Röntgen was initially investigating cathode rays (electron beam) in vacuum tubes. He had covered his apparatus with an opaque layer of black material and was working in the dark when he noticed a fluorescent glow which could not have come from the cathode rays. He discovered the glow was caused by a new ray of energy that he called x-rays to signify their unknown origins.

Elihu Thomson

Date of Birth: March 29, 1853

Notable Works: Thompson was a prolific inventor with over 700 patents including the invention of electric arc welding. He was the founder of Thomson-Houston Electric Company which merged with Thomas Edison’s company to become the General Electric Company.

Robert Bunsen

Date of Birth: March 30, 1811

Notable Works: Bunsen was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.  The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after Bunsen and Kirchhoff.

Bunsen also developed several gas-analytical methods, was a pioneer in photochemistry, and did early work in the field of organic arsenic chemistry. With his laboratory assistant Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on the laboratory burners then in use.

Archibald Scott Couper

Date of Birth: March 31, 1831

Notable Works: Couper was a Scottish chemist who discovered carbon atoms were tetravalent and could form long chain molecules.

The general theory of the arrangement of atoms in molecules held molecules were built off a single central atom. The problem with the theory was many organic compounds seemed to not have a central atom. Couper’s discovery of carbon chains was important to knock down this theory.