Famous Inventors Born in October

James Frank Duryea

Date of Birth: October 8, 1869

Profession: Engineer

Notable Works: Frank and his brother  Charles  (1861–1938) invented the first gasoline-powered automobile in America.

The brothers were bicycle makers who became interested in the new gasoline engines and automobiles.

Charles Duryea and Frank Duryea were the first Americans to build a successful commercial automobile and the first to incorporate an American business for the expressed purpose of building automobiles for sale to the public.

Friedrich Bergius

Date of Birth: October 11, 1884 

Profession: German chemist 

Notable Works: Bergius is best known for the Bergius process of producing synthetic fuel from coal. Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1931, together with Carl Bosch) in recognition of contributions to the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods.

During his habilitation, techniques for the high-pressure and high-temperature chemistry of carbon-containing substrates were developed, yielding a patent on the Bergius process in 1913. In this process liquid hydrocarbons used as synthetic fuel are produced by hydrogenation of lignite (brown coal). 

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Date of Birth: October 19, 1910

Profession: Indian-American astrophysicist

Notable Works: His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes. 

Many concepts, institutions, and inventions, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are named after him.

Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his work on the structural evolution of stars.

David Norman Schramm

Date of Birth: October 25, 1945 

Profession: American astrophysicist and educator

Notable Works: David was one of the world’s foremost experts on the Big Bang theory. Schramm was a pioneer in establishing particle astrophysics as a vibrant research field. He was particularly well known for the study of Big Bang nucleosynthesis and its use as a probe of dark matter (both baryonic and non-baryonic) and neutrinos. He also made important contributions to the study of cosmic rays, supernova explosions, heavy-element nucleosynthesis, and nuclear astrophysics generally.

Isaac Merritt Singer

Date of Birth: October 27, 1811 

Profession:  American inventor, and actor.

Notable Works: Isaac made important improvements in the design of the sewing machine and was the founder of what became one of the first American multi-national businesses, the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha

Date of Birth: October 30, 1909

Profession: Indian nuclear physicist 

Notable Works: who is widely credited as the “father of the Indian nuclear programme“. He was the founding director and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), as well as the founding director of the Atomic Energy Establishment, Trombay (AEET) which was renamed the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour. He was the first chairman of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy. By supporting space science projects which initially derived their funding from the AEC, he played an important role in the birth of the Indian space programme.