Famous Inventors Born in May!

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Date of Birth: May 18, 1952

He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes, a complex molecule found in all living cells

Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.

Emile Berliner

Date of Birth: May 20, 1851

He is best known for inventing the lateral-cut flat disc record (called a “gramophone record” in British and American English) used with a gramophone. He founded the United States Gramophone Company in 1894;

 Berliner also invented what was probably the first radial aircraft engine (1908), a helicopter (1919), and acoustical tiles (1920s)

Albrecht Grafe

Date of Birth: May 22, 1828

Mr. Grafe was a pioneer eye surgeon who founded modern ophthalmology.

Among his achievements were a method of treating glaucoma and a new operation for cataracts.

He introduced iridectomy for glaucoma, identified retardation of the eyelid in Basedow’s disease, and described the combination of retinitis pigmentosa and perceptive deafness in Usher’s syndrome. Also, he provided early descriptions of optic neuritis (1860), chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia (1868), and papilledema (involving four patients with brain tumor and a swelling of the optic disc).In addition, he is credited with design of a specialized knife, the “Von Graefe knife”, for cataract surgery.

Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky

 Date of Birth: May 25, 1889

Sikorsky was a Ukrainian–American aviation pioneer in both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. 

One of aviation’s greatest designers, Sikorsky began work on helicopters as early as 1910. By 1940, Sikorsky’s successful VS-300 had become the model for all modern single-rotor helicopters. He also designed and built the first military helicopter, the XR-4, which he delivered to the U.S. Army in 1941.

Sikorsky’s helicopters had the control capabilities to fly safely forwards and backward, up and down and sideways. In 1958, Sikorsky’s rotorcraft company made the world’s first helicopter that had a boat hull. It could land and take off from the water; and floated on water as well.

Ebenezer Butterick

Date of Birth: May 29, 1826

Regarded as the inventor of standardized paper patterns for clothing, Ebenezer Butterick revolutionized the way in which Americans were dressed. His Butterick Publishing Company distributed the first graded sewing patterns allowing for non-professionals to make their own clothing, while also making it easier for tailors to do so.

Julius Richard Petri

Date of Birth: May 31, 1852

He was a German physician and bacteriologist, remembered for his name given to the Petri dish. This is a shallow, cylindrical dish made of plastic or glass with a cover, used for tissue cultures and to hold solid media for culturing and sub-culturing bacteria. Petri developed it for a technique for cloning bacterial strains using an agar slope and sub-culturing onto his dish, recognizing different bacterial colonies and again sub-culturing.