Famous Inventors Born in September

William Le Baron Jenney

Date of Birth: Sept. 25, 1832 

Notable Works: Jenney was an American architect and engineer known for building the first skyscraper in 1884.

Seymour R Cray

Date of Birth: Sept. 28, 1925

Notable Works: was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called “the father of supercomputing”.

Sir James Dewar

Date of Birth: Sept. 20, 1842

Notable Works: Mr. Dewar was a British chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. 

Claude Georges

Date of Birth:  Sept. 24, 1870

Notable Works: a French engineer, chemist, and inventor of the neon light, which found widespread use in signs and was the forerunner of the fluorescent light and for a giant experiment on generating energy by pumping cold seawater up from the depths.

John Clark Sheehan

Date of Birth: Sept. 23, 1915

Notable Works: American organic chemist whose work on synthetic penicillin led to tailor-made forms of the drug. After nine years of hard work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), he became the first to discover a practical method for synthesizing penicillin V.

Over the four decades he worked at M.I.T., Sheehan came to hold over 30 patents, including the invention of ampicillin, a commonly used semi-synthetic penicillin that is taken orally rather than by injection. His research covered not only penicillin, but also peptides, other antibiotics, alkaloids, and steroids.

Jan Ernst Matzeliger

Date of Birth: Sept. 15, 1852

Notable Works:  Matzeliger was an inventor of Surinamese and Dutch descent who invented the automatic shoe-lasting machine, mechanizing the complex process of joining a shoe sole to its upper and revolutionizing the shoe industry, making footwear more affordable.

Oliver Evans

Date of Birth: Sept. 13, 1755

Notable Works: American inventor who pioneered the high-pressure steam engine (U.S. patent, 1790) and created the first continuous production line (1784).