January 31: Edwin H. Armstrong
(Born December 18, 1890: Died January 31/Feburary 1, 1954)
Edwin H(oward) Armstrong was the American inventor who laid the foundation for much of modern radio and electronic circuitry. Fascinated by radio from childhood, he built a 125-foot-tall antenna in the front yard in 1910 and invented the continuous-wave transmitter (1912), the regenerative circuit (1912), superheterodyne circuits (1918), and frequency modulation for the FM radio system (1933). His inventions and developments form the backbone of radio communications as we know it. Exhausted by nonstop patent battles from the 1920s on, he took his own life. Nevertheless, he won most of the suits posthumously.

January 30: John Bardeen
(Born May 23, 1908: Died January 30, 1991)
American physicist who was cowinner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in both 1956 and 1972. He shared the 1956 prize with William B. Shockley and Walter H. Brattain for their joint invention of the transistor. With Leon N. Cooper and John R. Schrieffer he was awarded the 1972 prize for development of the theory of superconductors, usually called the BCS-theory.

January 29: Allen B. DuMont
(Born January 29, 1901: Died November 15, 1965)
Allen B(alcom) Du Mont was an American engineer who perfected the first commercially practical cathode-ray tube, which was not only vitally important for much scientific and technical equipment but was the essential component of the modern television receiver. The early cathode ray tubes were imported from Germany at high cost, but they burned out after 25 or 30 hours. In the 1930's, he simplified and improved the production of cathode ray tubes lasting a thousand hours. A financially successful by-product of his television work was the cathode ray oscillograph. After WW II, Du Mont had become the industry's first millionaire, investing also in broadcasting stations. The Du Mont Broadcasting Co. he began in 1955 grew to become Metromedia, Inc.

January 28: First telephone exchange
In 1878, the first commercial telephone exchange in the U.S. was installed at New Haven, Connecticut, and served 21 subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. For the first six weeks, the exchange was not operated at night. Instead of "hello," the first experimental shout was "Ahoy, ahoy." The first operator was George W. Coy. A Bell franchise had been awarded for New Haven and Middlesex Counties to Coy on 3 Nov 1877, paid for by incorporating as a company with two financial partners. Coy improvised his first crude switchboard, using carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire. The concept of interconnecting phone wires had been tried before by three other men, but none of these men attempted commercial telephone operations.

January 27: Incandescent lamp
In 1880, Thomas Edison received a patent (#223,898) for his electric incandescent lamp he invented on 21 Nov 1879. Edison's invention of the light bulb had a major impact on the electronics and computer industries. During the two years of research it took to develop the bulb, one of Edison's assistants noticed a flow of energy from one electrode to another in a pattern later known as the Edison effect. Later, the Edison effect was discovered to be an electron flow, which laid the basis for the electron tube and thence the entire electronics industry.

January 26: Nikolaus August Otto
German engineer who developed the four-stroke internal-combustion engine, which offered the first practical alternative to the steam engine as a power source. A French engineer, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, formulated the basic design for the four-stroke internal combustion engine and patented it in 1862, but never built a working model. In 1876, Otto used principles from Beau de Rochas and others to construct the prototype of today's automobile engines, often called the Otto-cycle engine. He sold thousands of copies before Beau de Rochas sued him and invalidated Otto's patent. But light, efficient Otto-cycle engines largely enabled the creation of automobiles, powerboats, motorcycles and even airplanes.

January 25: Sir Isaac Shoenberg
(Born March 1, 1880: Died January 25, 1963)
Russian-Born British electrical engineer and principal inventor of the first high-definition television system, as used by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for the world's first public high-definition telecast (from London, 1936). He had installed the first radio stations in Russia before moving to England in 1914. He was head of a research group for Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) that developed (1931-35) an advanced kind of camera tube (the Emitron) and a relatively efficient hard-vacuum cathode-ray tube for the television receiver. Until 1964 the BBC used his technical standard proposal - 405 scanning lines and 25 pictures a second. He was director of EMI from 1955. His youngest son, David Shoenberg, became a noted physicist.

January 24: Early computer
In 1948, IBM dedicated its "SSEC" in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays. It occupied three sides of a 30-ft x 60-ft room. On the back wall, three punches and thirty readers provided paper-tape storage. Banks of vacuum tube circuits for card reading and sequence control and 36 paper tape readers comprising the table-lookup section occupied the left wall. Most of the right wall was filled by the electronic arithmetic unit and storage. In the center of the room were card readers, card punches, printers, and the operator's console. It was visible to pedestrians on the sidewalk outside.

January 23: Paul Langevin
(Born January 23, 1872: Died December 19, 1946)
French physicist who was the first scientist to explain the effects of paramagnetism and diamagnetism (the weak attraction or repulsion of substances in a magnetic field), in 1905, using statistical mechanics. He further theorized how the effects could be explained by how electron charges behaved within the atom. He popularized Einstein's theories for the French public. During WW I, he began developing a source for high intensity ultrasonic waves, which made sonar detection of submarines possible. He created the ultrasound from piezoelectric crystals vibrated by high-frequency radio circuits. In WW II, he spoke out against the Nazis, for which he was arrested and imprisoned, though he managed to escaped and fled to Switzerland.

January 22: Albert Wallace Hull
(Born April 19, 1880: Died January 22, 1966)
American physicist who independently discovered the powder method of X-ray analysis of crystals (1917), which permits the study of crystalline materials in a finely divided microcrystalline, or powder, state. His first work was on electron tubes, X-ray crystallography, and (during WW II) piezoelectricity. In the 1920's, he studied noise measurements in diodes and triodes. In the 1930's, he also took interest in metallurgy and glass science. His best-known work was done after the war, especially his classic paper on the effect of a uniform magnetic field on the motion of electrons between coaxial cylinders. He also invented the magnetron (1921) and the thyratron (1927), and other electron tubes with wide application as components in electronic circuits.

January 21: H.L. Callendar
(Born April 18, 1863: Died January 21, 1930)
H(ugh) L(ongbourne) Callendar was a British physicist who made notable contributions to thermometry, calorimetry, and knowledge of the thermodynamic properties of steam. Callendar in 1886 described a precise thermometer based on the electrical resistivity of platinum; since then, platinum resistance thermometers have been prescribed for the determination of temperatures between the defined points of internationally recognized temperature scales. Later he developed the electrical continuous-flow calorimeter, which measures the heat-carrying properties of liquids. He also invented the compensated air thermometer (1891), and a radio balance (1910).

January 20: Zénobe-Théophile Gramm
(Born April 4, 1826: Died January 20, 1901)
French electrical engineer and inventor (1869) of the Gramme dynamo, a continuous-current electrical generator that gave principal impetus to the development of electric power. In 1870 he invented a continuous-current dynamo with a ring armature (a ring of soft iron around which were placed insulated copper coils). This produced much higher voltages than other dynamos of the time and was the first high-voltage direct-current generator practical for mass production and distribution. Driven by steam-engines, they were immediately successful and were used for a variety of purposes, including factory lighting, electroplating, and lighthouses. With these dynamos, the era of large-scale electrical engineering began.

January 19: Edison patent
In 1904, Thomas A. Edison was issued a patent for an" Electrical Automobile" (No. 750,102) designed with a driving motor that may be conveniently and effectively utilized for the purpose of charging the batteries. Thus a small steam engine, preferable of the turbine type, was connected to the armature of an electric motor. By reversing the rotation of the motor-armature, the electric motor converts to a generator for charging the batteries. A clutch then is used to disconnect the motor from the driving wheels during charging (or, the wheels could be jacked up during the charging operation). In usual operation, the motor ran from storage batteries to power the carriage.

January 18: Hans Goldschmidt
(Born January 18, 1861: Died May 25, 1923)
German chemist who invented the alumino-thermic process (1905). Sometimes called the Goldschmidt reduction process, this operation involves reactions of oxides of certain metals with aluminum to yield aluminum oxide and the free metal. The process has been employed to produce such metals as chromium, manganese, and cobalt from oxide ores.

January 17: Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Kohlrausch
(Born October 14, 1840: Died January 17, 1910)
German physicist who investigated the properties of electrolytes (substances that conduct electricity in solutions by transfer of ions) and contributed to the understanding of their behaviour. Some of Kohlrausch's pioneering achievements include conductivity measurements on electrolytes, his work on the determination of basic magnetic and electrical quantities, and the enhancement of the associated measuring technologies. It was under his direction that the "Physikalisch- Technische Reichsanstalt" (the then Imperial Physical Technical Institute in Germany) created numerous standards and calibration standards which were also used internationally outside Germany.

January 16: Robert Jemison Van de Graaff
(Born December 20, 1901: Died January 16, 1967)
American physicist and inventor of the Van de Graaff generator, a type of high-voltage electrostatic generator that can be used as a particle accelerator in atomic research. The potential differences achieved in modern Van de Graaff generators can be up to 5 MV. It is a principle of electric fields that charges on a surface can leap off at points where the curvature is great, that is, where the radius is small. Thus, a dome of great radius will inhibit the electric discharge and added charge can reach a high voltage. This generator has been used in medical (such as high-energy X-ray production) and industrial applications (sterilization of food). In the 1950s, Van de Graaff invented the insulating core transformer able to produce high voltage direct current.

January 15: Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff
(Born January 15, 1803: Died December 20, 1877)
German mechanic who, as an instrument maker in Paris, invented the Ruhmkorff coil. This design of induction coil that could produce sparks more than 1 ft (30 cm) in length. The design was later popular for energizing discharge tubes and in particular those for generating X-rays (which were discovered in 1895 by Roentgen). The device uses a primary coil and iron core concentric with a secondary coil with a large number of turns. By using a contact breaker giving abrupt and rapid interruptions in the primary coil current, a concentrated, changing magnetic field produced a high voltage in the secondary coil. He also invented a thermo-electric battery in 1844.

January 14: Johann Phillipp Reis
(Born January 7, 1834: Died January 14, 1874)
German physicist whose invention of an early telephone preceded Bell's work. At the age of 27, he constructed a rudimentary transmitter by placing an animal ear membrane in front of an electrical contact. A galvanic inductor oscillated in the receiver in the same manner as the transmitted signal. Reis's instrument conveyed certain sounds, poorly, but no more than that; intelligible speech could not be reproduced.. The professors to whom this invention was presented were not very impressed and this version of the "telephone" never received any financial support and no patent ensued. Reis' devices were fragile and clumsy laboratory models, never put to public use.

January 13: Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti
(Born April 9, 1864: Died January 13, 1930)
English electrical engineer who promoted the installation of large electrical generating stations and alternating current distribution networks in England. He was interested in electrical and mechanical devices as a youth, and in 1881, began such employment while in his late teens. In his 20's, he began planning an ambitious generating station about 8 miles outside London, to use transmission at an unprecedented 10,000 volts - four times greater than previously practical. For this he began designing suitable cables, transformers and generators. His idea of making high voltage flexible cables using wax-impregnated paper for insulation was a landmark development used exclusively until the advent of synthetic materials. His 176 patents cover varied inventions.

January 12: Edison Patent
In 1886, a patent for an "Electrode for Telephone- Transmitters" was issued to Thomas Alva Edison (No. 348114). The patent application was dated one year earlier on 12 Jan 1885.

January 11: Federick Mark Becket
(Born January 11, 1875: Died December 1, 1942)
Canadian metallurgist who held more than one hundred patents, covering a wide range of electric furnace and chemical products, notably ferro-alloys, calcium carbide, and special chromium steels. He developed a process of using silicon instead of carbon as a reducing agent in metal production, thus making low-carbon ferroalloys and certain steels practical. His processes for the production of low carbon ferro-alloys had world-wide application.

January 9: Frederick Gardner Cottrell
(Born January 10, 1877: Died November 16, 1948)
U.S. educator and scientist who invented the industrial electrostatic precipitator (1907), which eliminates suspended particles from streams of gases. He patented the "Art of Separating Suspended Particles from Gaseous Bodies" (No. 895,729). To electrochemists, he is best known for the Cottrell equation. Electrostatic precipitators are still widely used to reduce air pollution by smoke from power plants and dust from cement kilns and other industrial sources. Cottrell contributed to the development of a process for the separation of helium from natural gas, and also was instrumental in establishing the synthetic ammonia industry in the U.S. during attempts to perfect a high temperature process for formation of nitric oxide.

January 9: Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg
(Born January 9, 1869: Died April 3, 1910)
German physical chemist who, with Boländer proposed a theory of valency (1899) to explain the capacity of an atom to combine with another atom in light of the newly discovered presence of electrons within the atom. He saw that the configurations of electrons in the noble gas elements are particularly stable. Thus, a halide element, such as chlorine, with one electron less than a noble gas element, would easily tend to accept one electron. An alkali metal element, such as sodium, having one electron more than a noble gas element, would tend to give it up. Thus a sodium atom could transfer an electron to a chlorine atom, forming a positively charged sodium ion bound electrostatically to a negatively charged chloride ion. He died in a balloon crash

January 8: Stephen W. Hawking
(Born January 8, 1942)
English theoretical physicist who is one of the world's leaders in his field. His principal areas of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University (formerly held by Sir Isaac Newton). Afflicted with Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; ALS), Hawking is confined to a wheelchair and is unable to speak without the aid of a computer voice synthesizer. However, despite his challenges, he has utilized his intelligence, knowledge and abilities to make remarkable contributions to the field of cosmology (the study of the universe as a whole). Hawking wrote the book A Brief History of Time.