Famous Inventors Born in May!
Explore the famous inventors born in May with IDiyas. From Elijah McCoy who improved steam engine technology, to Edward Jenner who created the smallpox vaccine, the world’s first vaccine. May has witnessed the birth of numerous influential scientists and inventors who left an indelible mark on history.
Elijah McCoy
Date of Birth: May 2, 1844
The highly prolific African-American inventor.
Elijah was a Black American inventor who received more than 50 patents for his inventions during his lifetime. McCoy improved steam engine technology by designing an automatic lubricator.
Machinists and engineers who wanted genuine McCoy lubricators might have used the expression “the real McCoy”βa term meaning “the real deal” or “the genuine article.”
Sir George Paget Thomson
Date of Birth: May 3, 1892
Son of J.J Thomson (who is credited with the discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be discovered), George Paget Thomson won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for the discovery of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.
βWhereas his father had seen the electron as a particle (and won his Nobel Prize in the process in 1906), George Paget demonstrated that it could be diffracted like a wave.
He was knighted in 1943.
Sigmund Freud
Date of Birth: May 6, 1856
Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a movement that popularized the theory that unconscious motives control much of our behaviour)
Freud published in 1895, Studien uΜber Hysterie (Studies in Hysteria). By encouraging the patient to express any random thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche that Freud called the unconscious.
Freud came to the conclusion, based on his clinical experience with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted material was sexual in nature. He linked the etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it.He became interested in hypnotism and how it could be used to help the mentally ill.
He later abandoned hypnotism in favor of free association and dream analysis in developing what is now known as “the talking cure”. Freud contended that dreams played a fundamental role in the psychic economy, and presented his findings in βThe Interpretation of Dreamsβ (1899)
Cecilia Payne
Day of Birth:Β May 10, 1900
She discovered that stars are made mainly of hydrogen and helium and established that stars could be classified according to their temperatures. She was also one of the first to apply laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies.
During the 1920s, the accepted explanation of the Sun’s composition was a calculation of around 65% iron and 35% hydrogen. In her doctoral thesis (1925), Payne claimed that the sun’s spectrum was consistent with another solution: 99% hydrogen with helium, and just 1% iron. It took another 20 years before Payne’s original claim was confirmed, by Fred Hoyle.
She later studied variable stars, making over 1,250,000 observations with her assistants of the Milky Way. This work later was extended to the Magellanic Clouds, adding a further 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. In 1956 she became the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within the faculty at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Richard Feynman
Date of Birth: May 11, 1918
He was an American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era. By age 15, he had mastered calculus. He took every physics course at MIT. Even before earning a graduate degree, Feynman was recruited to work on means to produce enriched uranium for use in an atomic bomb, as part of what would become the Manhattan Project. In 1942 he went to Los Alamos where Hans Bethe made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader in the theoretical division, to work on estimating how much uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass for the atomic bomb.
After WW2, Feynman was known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium.
Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles (known as Feynman diagrams). In the 1980s, he was a member of the Rogers Commission- the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Feynman shown on live TV by a practical demonstration how the stiffness of O-rings in the rocket caused as a result of cold temperatures the night prior to the launch could have been the reason for the disaster, and in doing so exposed the lukewarm attitude of NASA towards flight safety protocol.
Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for work in quantum electrodynamics.
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About The Author
Angelina Kushnarova
Angelina Kushnarova (Sverediuk) was born in Ukraine. She graduated from Ternopil Medical University with a specialization in Medicine and completed an internship in Radiology at Lviv University. She worked as a Radiologist, while also working as a web developer.