Famous Inventors Born in March!

Archer John Porter Martin

Date of Birth: March 1, 1910

Notable Works: Martin was an English biochemist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Richard Synge for the invention of partition chromatography. Partition chromatography is a technique to separate similar substances by repeated extraction of two immiscible liquids. It can separate amino acids to aid in the study of proteins, carbohydrates, and DNA. He also developed gas-liquid chromatography.

Alexander Graham Bell

Date of Birth: March 3, 1847

Notable Works: Bell was the Scottish inventor of the first practical telephone. His primary research was into the study of speech and hearing. His work with the deaf would ultimately lead to the development of the first practical telephone.

The actual invention of the telephone came about while Bell was working on a method to transmit multiple telegraph messages on a single telegraph line for Western Union. After Bell patented his telephone device, he offered to sell the patent outright to Western Union for $100,000 in 1879 (almost $2.5 million today).

Andreas Sigismund Marggraf

Date of Birth: March 3, 1709

Notable Works: Marggraf was a German chemist who is best known for the discovery of sugar in beets and developing a process to remove it. He also discovered phosphoric acid and disproved the idea that alkaloids soda ash (calcium carbonate) and potash (potassium carbonate) were identical. Marggraf introduced several analytical techniques such as flame tests to identify alkali metals and the precipitation method to detect the presence of iron. He also independently isolated pure zinc metal.

Jacques Babinet

Date of Birth: March 5, 1794

Notable Works: Babinet was a French physicist who is best known for his study of optics. Among his contributions was the proposal to adopt the wavelength of light as the basis for a standard of measurement. His proposal centered around the distinctive red spectral line of cadmium as a way to standardize the definition of an angstrom used in spectroscopy.

Joseph von Fraunhofer

Date of Birth: March 6, 1787

Notable Works: Fraunhofer was a German physicist who developed the first modern spectroscope. Previous spectroscopes used prisms to split light into its rainbow spectrum. Fraunhofer’s spectroscope combined a prism with a diffraction slit to expand the light further. He also added a small telescope to improve the accuracy of measurements. This device was used to examine the spectrum of sunlight and discovered thin dark lines.

Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce

Date of Birth: March 7, 1765

Notable Works: Niépce was a French inventor who is considered the inventor of photography. He invented a process called heliography or ‘sun writing’ that used bitumen dissolved in lavender oil spread onto a sheet of paper. The paper was used in a camera obscura setup and exposed for up to eight hours. The paper would then be washed again with lavender oil to remove the unexposed sections of bitumen to show the image.

Edward Calvin Kendall

Date of Birth: March 8, 1886

Notable Works: Kendal was an American chemist who discovered the hormone cortisone. He also shares the 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Tadeus Reichstein and Philip Hench for their research on the structure and effects of adrenal cortex hormones. He independently discovered the adrenal hormone cortisone and isolated the thyroid hormone thyroxine and determined its structure.

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin

Date of Birth: March 9, 1934

Notable Works: Gagarin was a Soviet cosmonaut who became the first person in space. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin was launched aboard Vostok 1 and orbited the Earth once before re-entering the atmosphere and parachuting to safety. He was never assigned to another spaceflight because of his celebrity and nation’s fear of losing him in an accident.