January 31: George Robert Stibitz
(Born April 30, 1904: Died January 31, 1995)
U.S. mathematician who was regarded by many as the "father of the modern digital computer." While serving as a research mathematician at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City, Stibitz worked on relay switching equipment used in telephone networks. In 1937, Stibitz, a scientist at Bell Laboratories built a digital machine based on relays, flashlight bulbs, and metal strips cut from tin-cans. He called it the "Model K" because most of it was constructed on his kitchen table. It worked on the principle that if two relays were activated they caused a third relay to become active, where this third relay represented the sum of the operation. Also, in 1940, he gave a demonstration of the first remote operation of a computer.

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: Julian W. Hill
(Born September 4, 1904: Died January 28, 1996)
Julian Werner Hill was a U.S. research chemist who discovered cold drawing, a technique of strengthening polymer fibers by stretching. Julian Hill and Wallace Carothers had been building long polymer chains by a reaction of a carboxylic acid with an alcohol to give an ester in a device called a molecular still. While removing a sample of the resultant product from the still, Hill observed that the molten polymer could be drawn into fibers. He then made an important and unexpected discovery - that after being cooled, these pliable filaments could be stretched or "cold drawn" to form very strong fibers. Further tests on the sample showed that it had a molecular weight of over 12,000, far higher than any previous polymer.

January 27: Tape recorder
In 1948, Wire Recording Corporation of America announced the first magnetic wire recorder. It is lightweight and portable. The 'Wireway' machine with a built-in oscillator sold for $149.50. Image: Wireway portable combination magnetic wire recorder and phonograph - ca. 1950

January 26: Polykarp Kusch
(Born January 26, 1911: Died March 20, 1993)
German-American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1955 for his accurate determination that the magnetic moment of the electron is greater than its theoretical value. This he deduced from researching the hyperfine structure of the energy levels in certain elements, and in 1947 found a discrepancy of about 0.1% between the observed value and that predicted by theory. Although minute, this anomaly was of great significance to theories of the interactions of electrons and electromagnetic radiation, now known as quantum electrodynamics. (He shared the prize with Willis E. Lamb, Jr. who performed independent but related experiments at Columbia University on the hyperfine structure of the hydrogen atom.)

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: Hideki Yukawa
(Born January 23, 1907: Died September 8, 1981)
Japanese physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1949 for research in the theory of elementary particles. In 1935, he published a paper entitled On the Interaction of Elementary Particles* in which he proposed a new field theory of nuclear forces and predicted the existence of the previously unknown meson. Mesons are particles heavier than electrons but lighter thanprotons. Encouraged by the discovery by American physicists of one type of meson in cosmic rays, in 1937, he devoted himself to the development of the meson theory, on the basis of his original idea. Since 1947 he worked mainly on the general theory of elementary particles in connection with the concept of the "non-local" field.

January 22: Horace Bénédict de Saussure
(Born February 17, 1740: Died January 22, 1799)
Swiss physicist, geologist, and early Alpine explorer. He made an extensive study of the structure of the Alps, described in the four volumes of Voyages dans les Alpes (1779-96). His theory was neptunian, but with uniformitarian overtones. The word geology was introduced into scientific nomenclature by Saussure with the publication of the first volume. Saussure developed what was probably the first electrometer (1766), used to measure electric potential. He also developed an improved hygrometer to measure atmospheric humidity (1783), the first to use human hair for the purpose.

January 21: H.L. Callender
(Born April 18, 1863: Died January 21, 1930)
Hugh Longbourne 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 Gramme
(Born April 4, 1826: Died January 20, 1901)
Belgian-born 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: Sir Henry Bessemer
(Born January 19, 1813: Died March 15, 1898)
English inventor and engineer who developed the first process for manufacturing steel inexpensively (1856), leading to the development of the Bessemer converter. Bessemer invented his steel making process to solve a specific problem vexing another of his inventions, the self-spinning artillery shell. The converter removed impurities from molten pig iron by oxidation through air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raised the temperature of the iron mass, keeping it molten. The oxidation process removed impurities such as silicon, manganese, and carbon as oxides, which oxides either escapd as gas or formed a solid slag. He also solved problems about the chemistry of ores, fuels, and steel. He held 110 patents at his death.

January 18: Joseph Dixon
Born 18 Jan 1799; died 15 Jun 1869. (Born January 18, 1799: Died June 15, 1869)
American inventor and manufacturer who pioneered in the industrial use of graphite and many other innovations. As a printer and a photographer, he designed a mirror into a camera that was the forerunner of the viewfinder, patented a double-crank steam engine, evolved a method of printing banknotes to foil counterfeiters, and patented a new method for tunneling under water. As a manufacturer and entrepreneur, Joseph Dixon produced the first pencil made in the U.S. and was responsible for the development of the graphite industry there. When he died, the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company was the largest manufacturer of graphite products in the world. Listed among his friends were such great American inventors as Fulton, Morse, and Bell.

January 17: Benjamin Franklin
(Born January 17, 1706: Died April 17, 1790)
American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. He become widely known in European scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and theories. He invented a type of stove, still being manufactured, to give more warmth than open fireplaces; the lightning rod and bifocal eyeglasses also were his ideas. Grasping the fact that by united effort a community may have amenities which only the wealthy few can get for themselves, he helped establish institutions people now take for granted: a fire company (1736), a library (1731), an insurance company (1752), an academy (1751), and a hospital (1751). In some cases these foundations were the first of their kind in North America.

January 16: Oskar Barnack
(Born November 1, 1879: Died January 16, 1936)
German engineer who designed the first miniature camera (1913), the Leica I. Its commercial introduction, delayed by WW I, was made in 1924 by the Ernst Leitz optical firm at Wetzlar, Germany where he was employed. Barnack was an enthusiastic photographer from when only heavy plate cameras were available. As early 1905, he conceived using a reduced format negative, to be enlarged after exposure. He adapted his idea from equipment he made to take still exposures on samples of cine film to test their sensitivity and consistency before movie use. For this camera, Barnack established the standard 35-mm film picture size by doubling the standard 18x24mm cine frame. His invention had only 1/250 of the weight of a plate camera.

January 15: Elevator
In 1861, the safety elevator was patented as a "Hoisting Apparatus" by the American inventor, Elisha G. Otis, of Yonkers, New York. (No. 31,128). His invention was designed to arrest a fall in case of the lifting rope breaking. It used spring-loaded pawls that would release and engage in a mortised track in the walls of the shaft. In 1853, Otis had demonstrated a freight elevator equipped with a safety device to prevent falling in case a supporting cable should break. This increased public confidence and Otis established a company for manufacturing elevators. The first elevator for public use was a steam driven type installed by Otis Brothers (1857) in the five story Broadway department store of E.W Haughtwhat & Co.

January 14: Benjamin Stillman, Jr.
(Born: December 4, 1816: January 14, 1885)
American chemist whose report on the potential uses of crude-oil products gave impetus to plans for drilling the first producing oil well, near Titusville, Pa. Silliman separated the crude oil into its component parts, or its fractions, and observed the characteristics of each fraction. He determined by use of a photometer that distilled petroleum burned much brighter than all but the most expensive and least efficient fuels. He also noted its potential use as a lubricant; he found it capable of withstanding extremely high and low temperatures and able to keep its form after long use. Silliman concluded petroleum was "a raw material from which...they may manufacture a very valuable product. His report marked petroleum as the answer to the illumination fuel crisis.

January 13: Plastic automoblie patent
In 1942, the first U.S. patent for construction of an automobile using plastic was issued to Henry Ford of Dearborn, Mich. It covered an automobile body construction, an auto body chassis frame made of steel tubes or pipes designed for use with automobiles made from plastics. The first such car manufactured in the U.S. was produced by the Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, Mich. in Aug 1941. Fourteen plastic panels were mounted on a tubular welded frame. Together with windows and windshield made of acrylic sheets, a decrease in weight of approximately 30 percent was accomplished.

January 12: Frank Alvord Perret
(Born August 2, 1867: Died Januarty 12, 1943)
American electrical engineer and inventor who later became a pioneer field volcanologist. Using his prior experience at Thomas Edison's labs, at age 20, Perret co-founded the Elektron Mfg Co. in Brooklyn, NY developing the motors, dynamos and electric controls that the company manufactured (and later, elevators). The first American electric elevator (1887) was probably powered by an Elektron motor. He began a second career in 1904 as a volcanologist, using his electrical knowledge to the measure their seismic activity. He became well known for his studies at Vesuvius (1906), Etna (1910), Stromboli and Kilauea (1911). From 1929, he lived at the foot of Mont Pelée, Martinique, where he founded a memorial volcanological museum.

January 11: Carl David Anderson
(Born September 3, 1905: Died January 11, 1991)
American physicist who, with Victor Francis Hess of Austria, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of the positron, or positive electron, the first known particle of antimatter. He examined the photographs of cosmic rays taken as they passed through a Wilson cloud chamber in a strong magnetic field. Besides the curved paths of negative electrons, he found also paths deviating in the opposite direction, corresponding to positively charged particles - yet having the the same mass as an electron! Previously, Dirac had predicted such particles by theoretical solution to electromagnetic field equations. Anderson has now found the existance of positron.

January 10: 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: Willis Rodney Whitney
(Born August 22, 1868: Died January 9, 1958)
American chemist and research director who founded the General Electric Company's research laboratory and directed pioneering work there. He is known as the "father of basic research in industry" because it became a model for industrial scientific laboratories elsewherein the U.S. In Oct 1900 he was offered a research position at the General Electric (GE) Co., Schenectady, N.Y. His self-directed research program there began on a basis of three days a week. He quickly proved that chemical research techniques (such as use of an electric furnace) could be highly useful in the electrical industry. By 1904 he was directing 41 staff. His own 40 patents included the GEM lamp filament (1904), but contributed indirectly to many inventions.

January 8: John W. Mauchly
(Born August 30, 1907: Died January 8, 1980)
American physicist and engineer, who with John P. Eckert invented (1946) the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first general-purpose electronic computer. Mauchly initially conceived of the computer's architecture, and Eckert possessed the engineering skills to bring the idea to life. ENIAC was developed (1946) for the US Army Ordnance Department as what was probably the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was a vast machine, consuming 100 kW of electric power and containing 18,000 electronic valves. Their successful UNIVAC computer (1951) was the first commercial computer, and introduced magnetic tape for programming.

January 7: Nikola Tesla
(Born July 9/10, 1856: Died January 7, 1943)
Serbian-American inventor and researcher (born on the stroke of midnight) who designed and built the first alternating current induction motor in 1883. He emigrated to the United States in 1884. Having discovered the benefits of a rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery, he expanded its use in dynamos, transformers, and motors. Because alternating current could be transmitted over much greater distances than direct current, George Westinghouse bought patents from Tesla the system when he built the power station at Niagara Falls to provide electricity power the city of Buffalo, NY.

January 6: Bern Dibner
(Born August 18, 1897: Died January 6, 1988)
Ukrainian-American engineer and science historian. Dibner worked as an engineer during the electrification of Cuba. Realizing the need for improved methods of connecting electrical conductors, in 1924, he founded the Burndy Engineering Company. A few years later, he became interested in the history of Renaissance science. Subsequently, he began collecting books and everything he could find that was related to the history of science. This became a second career as a scholar that would run parallel with his life as a businessman. He wrote many books and pamphlets, on topics from the transport of ancient obelisks, to authorative biographies of many scientific pioneers, including Volta, inventor of the electric battery, and Roentgen, discoverer of the X ray.

January 5: Louis-Paul Cailletet
(Born September 21, 1832: Died January 5, 1913)
French physicist and ironmaster, noted for his work on liquefaction of gases. Working at his father's metallugy business, he investigated the permeability of iron to hydrogen and other gases, accounting for the unpredictable behaviour of some irons in terms of an excess of dissolved gases. In 1870, he began carefully measuring whether real gases deviate from "ideal" gas law behaviour. From this grew an interest in the liquefaction of gases. He used the Joule-Thomson effect - compressing a gas whilst cooling it, then allowing its rapid expansion to cool it still further - and in 1877-78, was first to produce droplets of liquid oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and acetylene. He also invented the altimeter and the high-pressure manometer.

January 4: Brian D. Josephson
(Born January 4, 1940)
British physicist who discovered the Josephson effect (1962) - a flow of electric current as electron pairs, called Cooper Pairs, between two superconducting materials that are separated by an extremely thin insulator. This arrangement is called a Josephson Junction. He was a graduate student, 22 years old, at the time. Subsequently, he was awarded a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics (with Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever).

January 3: Alexander Meissner
(Born September 14, 1883: Died January 3, 1958)
Austrian engineer whose work in antenna design, amplification, and detection advanced the development of radio telegraphy. In 1907 he joined the Telefunken Company of Berlin, where he conducted research on radio problems. He improved the design of antennas for transmitting at long wavelengths, devised new vacuum-tube circuits and amplification systems, and developed the heterodyne principle for radio reception. In 1911 Meissner designed the first rotary radio beacon to aid in the navigation of the Zeppelin airships. In 1913 he was the first to amplify high-frequency radio signals by using feedback in a vacuum triode; this principle made it possible to build radio receivers more sensitive than any earlier type.