Learn about the history of science by reading about the significant scientific events that took place on this day in history.
2004 - Philip Hauge Abelson died.
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Abelson was an American chemist who proposed the gas diffusion process to separate uranium-235 and uranium-238 needed to develop the atomic bomb. He also co-discovered with Edwin McMillan the element neptunium.
1996 - Tadeus Reichstein died.
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Reichstein was a Polish born Swiss chemist who shares the 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Edward Calvin Kendall and Philip Showalter Hench for his independent discoveries concerning the hormones of the adrenal cortex and the isolation of cortisone. He also produced the first successful industrially synthesized ascorbic acid (vitamin C) by the Reichstein process.
1970 - Otto Heinrich Warburg died.
Warburg was a German biochemist who was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discoveries into cellular respiration or how living cells take up oxygen. He identified the family of enzymes called cytochromes where the iron-containing heme group binds oxygen. He also isolated the first flavoprotein, flavine that participates in dehydrogenation reactions in cells.1967 - Richard Kuhn died.
Kuhn was an Austrian-German biochemist who was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into carotenoids and vitamins. Carotenoids are the organic pigments in plant cells or created by algae or bacteria. Kuhn discovered, purified and determined the composition of eight of these compounds and purified them. He also isolated vitamins B6 and B12.1945 - Douglas D. Osheroff was born.
Osheroff is an American physicist who shares the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson for their discovery of the superfluidity state of helium-3. Superfluidity of helium describes the state liquid helium takes when cooled to nearly absolute zero when the viscosity of the liquid suddenly becomes zero.1924 - Georges Charpak was born.
Charpak is a Polish-French physicist who was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the multiwire proportional chamber and other particle detectors. A multiwire proportional chamber uses an array of high voltage wires in a chamber of ionizing gas. When a charged particle enters the chamber, it will ionize the gas and cause a current change in the wires near the particle's path. Measuring the current and determining which wire is supplying the current gives information on the position, path, charge and energy of the ionizing particle.1896 - William Robert Grove died.
Grove was a British lawyer and amateur scientist who developed the Grove cell. The Grove cell is a electric cell with platinum and zinc electrodes in sulfuric acid separated in a porous ceramic pot. He also created the first fuel cell that combines hydrogen and oxygen and uses the reaction to produce electrical energy.
1889 - Walther Gerlach was born.
Gerlach was a German physicist who discovered the quantization of spin in a magnetic field with Otto Stern. The Stern-Gerlach experiement used a beam of silver atoms accelerated across a uniform magnetic field. Under classical atomic theory, a detector should see a distribution of atoms deflected by a continuous distribution of spin angular momentum with definite maximum and minimum values. Gerlach and Stern discovered distinct discrete values.1885 - George de Hevesy was born.
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Hevesy was a Hungarian-Swedish chemist who was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of a technique to use radioisotopes to detect chemical processes in living systems. He prepared salt solutions using an isotope of lead (Pb212) and traced how plants absorbed the solution. He also discovered the element hafnium with Dick Coster in 1923.
1870 - Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was born.
Ivanov was a Soviet biologist who developed a method of artificial insemination for domestic animals. He is also known for his work and research with hybrid animals. Ivanov was famous for his experiments attempting to create a human-ape hybrid.
1774 - Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was born.
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Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck or just Lamarck was a French biologist who presented the first theory of evolution called Lamarkism. Lamarck believed physical traits were inherited through generations by two forces. The first force was an alchemical force that drove organisms into more complex forms and a second force driven by the organism's environment.
