Famous Inventors Born in November!

Marie Curie

Date of Birth: November 7, 1867

Profession: Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist.

Notable Works:

Marie performed groundbreaking research on radioactivity. She is well-known for conducting experiments on Uranium minerals in 1898 that led to the discovery of two new elements, Polonium and Radium. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in the year 1903 and also the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice in two different scientific fields, physics and Chemistry.

George Boole

Date of Birth: November 2, 1815

Profession:  self-taught English mathematician.

Notable Works: George Boole’s work laid the foundation for modern computer science and digital logic. His development of Boolean algebra became essential in computer programming and information technology.

Adolphe Sax

Date of Birth: November 6, 1814

Profession: Belgian inventor and musician

Notable Works: Mr. Sax invented the saxophone in the early 1840s, patenting it in 1846. He also invented the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba. He played the flute and clarinet.

Sax faced many brushes with death. As a child, he once fell from a height of three floors, hit his head on a stone and was believed dead. At the age of three, he drank a bowl full of acidic water, mistaking it for milk, and later swallowed a pin. He received serious burns from a gunpowder explosion and once fell onto a hot cast-iron frying pan, burning his side. Several times he avoided accidental poisoning and asphyxiation by sleeping in a room where varnished furniture was drying. Another time young Sax was struck on the head by a cobblestone and fell into a river, almost dying

Sir Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman

Date of Birth: November 7, 1888

Profession: Indian physicist

Notable Works:

Mr. Raman is noted for his exceptional work in light scattering. In 1930, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his auspicious research on the scattering of light and the discovery of the effect it causes, named after him the Raman Effect. This affects research in optics and acoustics.

Ronald George Wreyford Norrish

Date of Birth: November 9, 1897.

Profession: British chemist

Notable Works:

Mr. Norrish received the Nobel Prize in 1967, along with Manfred Eigen and George Porter, for the development of flash photolysis. One of his achievements is the invention of the Norrish reaction, a photochemical reaction in the field of organic chemistry with ketones and aldehydes.

Ernst Otto Fischer

Date of Birth: November 10, 1918

Profession: German chemistry scientist.

Notable Works:

He identified a new way metal could combine with organic substances. He won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for pioneering inventions in organometallic chemistry.  In 1952 Ernst Otto Fischer and Geoffrey Wilkinson, working independently of one another, revealed a new type of chemical compound consisting of a carbon compound and a metallic atom. In these sandwich structures, which do not exist in nature, two ring-shaped carbon compounds enclose a metallic atom on each side.

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, also known as Lord Rayleigh

Date of Birth: November 12, 1842

Notable Works:

Mr. Strutt was an English mathematician who contributed to Science by developing approaches to studying the various physical properties of gases in the atmosphere. He received the honorary Noble Prize, among many other recognitions, for his extensive research on the densities of the essential gases as well as for discovering the chemical element Argon in connection with all these studies.

Edward Adelbert Doisy

Date of Birth: November 13, 1893

Notable Works:

Mr. Doisy was an American biochemist who was chiefly concerned with the studies of sex hormones and Vitamins K1 and K2.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Henrik Dam in 1943 in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Vitamin K and its chemical structure. His study of sex hormones led to the isolation of estrone, and later on, he identified a more powerful female sex hormone called estradiol.