Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/September

Selected anniversaries in September

January • February • March • April • May • June • July • August • September • October • November • December

September 1:

• 1648 - Death of Marin Mersenne, French mathematician (b. 1588)

• 1804 - Juno, one of the largest main belt asteroids, was discovered by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding

• 1856 - Birth of Sergei Winogradsky, Russian scientist (d. 1953)

• 1859 - A solar superstorm affects electrical telegraph service

• 1877 - Birth of Francis William Aston, Nobel laureate (d. 1945)

• 1982 - Death of Haskell Curry, American mathematician (b. 1900)

• 1988 - Death of Luis Alvarez, American physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1911)

September 2:

• 1764 - Death of Nathaniel Bliss, English Astronomer Royal (b. 1700)

• 1768 - Death of Antoine Deparcieux, French mathematician (b. 1703)

• 1850 - Birth of Woldemar Voigt, German physicist (d. 1919)

• 1853 - Birth of Wilhelm Ostwald, German chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1932)

• 1859 - A solar super storm affects electrical telegraph service

• 1865 - Death of William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician (b. 1805)

• 1877 - Birth of Frederick Soddy, British chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1956)

• 1923 - Birth of René Thom, French mathematician (d. 2002)

September 3:

• 1710 - Birth of Abraham Trembley, Swiss naturalist (d. 1784)

• 1803 - English scientist John Dalton started using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements

• 1869 - Birth of Fritz Pregl, Slovenian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1930)

• 1899 - Birth of Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Australian biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1985)

• 1905 - Birth of Carl David Anderson, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1991)

• 1938 - Birth of Ryoji Noyori, Japanese chemist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1976 - Viking program: The Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars

• 2005 - Death of Richard S.R. Fitter, British ornithologist and botanist (b. 1913)

September 4:

• 1784 - Death of César-François Cassini de Thury, French astronomer (b. 1714)

• 1852 - Death of William MacGillivray, Scottish naturalist and ornithologist (b. 1796)

• 1888 - George Eastman registers the trademark Kodak and receives a patent for his camera that uses roll film

• 1906 - Birth of Max Delbrück, German biologist, Nobel laureate (d. 1981)

• 1913 - Birth of Stanford Moore, American chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1982)

• 1977 - Death of Jean Rostand, French biologist (b. 1894)

• 2006 - Death of Steve Irwin, Australian naturalist and television personality (b. 1962)

September 5:

• 1667 - Birth of Giovanni Gerolamo Saccheri, Italian mathematician (d. 1733)

• 1725 - Birth of Jean-Étienne Montucla, French mathematician (d. 1799)

• 1787 - Birth of François Sulpice Beudant, French mineralogist and geologist (d. 1850)

• 1792 - Birth of Pierre-Armand Dufrénoy, French geologist and mineralogist (d. 1857)

• 1901 - Death of Ignacij Klemenčič, Slovenian physicist (b. 1853)

• 1906 - Death of Ludwig Boltzmann, Austrian physicist (b. 1844)

• 1917 - Death of Marian Smoluchowski, Polish physicist (b. 1872)

• 1948 - Death of Richard C. Tolman, American mathematical physicist (b. 1881)

• 2002 - Death of David Todd Wilkinson, American astronomer, author of the first study of the Cosmic microwave background radiation (b. 1935)

September 6:

• 1635 - Death of Metius, Dutch mathematician and astronomer (b. 1571)

• 1649 - Death of Robert Dudley, styled Earl of Warwick, English explorer and geographer (b. 1574)

• 1732 - Birth of Johan Wilcke, Swedish physicist (d. 1796)

• 1766 - Birth of John Dalton, British chemist and physicist (d. 1844)

• 1802 - Birth of Alcide d'Orbigny, French naturalist (d. 1857)

• 1892 - Birth of Sir Edward Appleton, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965)

• 1902 - Death of Frederick Augustus Abel, English chemist (b. 1827)

• 1906 - Birth of Luis Federico Leloir, French-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987)

• 1939 - Birth of Susumu Tonegawa, Japanese molecular biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

• 1943 - Birth of Richard J. Roberts, English biochemist and molecular biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

September 7:

• 1707 - Birth of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, French naturalist, biologist and author (d. 1788)

• 1799 - Death of Louis Guillaume Lemonnier, French botanist (b. 1717)

• 1829 - Birth of Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, German organic chemist (d. 1896)

• 1836 - Birth of August Toepler, German physicist (d. 1912)

• 1917 - Birth of John Cornforth, Australian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1927 - The first fully electronic television system is achieved by Philo Taylor Farnsworth

• 1991 - Death of Edwin McMillan, American physicist (b. 1907)

September 8:

• 1588 - Birth of Marin Mersenne, French mathematician (d. 1648)

• 1811 - Death of Peter Simon Pallas, German zoologist (b. 1741)

• 1882 - Death of Joseph Liouville, French mathematician (b. 1809)

• 1918 - Birth of Derek Harold Richard Barton, British chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1998)

• 1930 - 3M begins marketing Scotch transparent tape

• 1965 - Death of Hermann Staudinger, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1881)

• 1980 - Death of Willard Libby, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1908)

• 1981 - Death of Hideki Yukawa, Japanese physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1907)

• 1985 - Death of John Franklin Enders, American scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1887)

September 9:

• 1737 - Birth of Luigi Galvani, Italian physician and physicist (d. 1798)

• 1839 - John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph

• 1841 - Death of A. P. de Candolle, Swiss botanist (b. 1778)

• 1920 - Birth of Feng Kang, Chinese mathematician (d. 1993)

• 1922 - Birth of Hans Georg Dehmelt, German-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1947 - First actual case of a computer bug being found: a moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University

• 1985 - Death of Paul Flory, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1910)

• 2003 - Death of Edward Teller, Hungarian-born physicist (b. 1908)

September 10:

• 1749 - Death of Émilie du Châtelet, French mathematician and physicist (b. 1706)

• 1846 - Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine

• 1892 - Birth of Arthur Compton, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1962)

• 1931 - Death of Dmitri Egorov, Russian mathematician (b. 1869)

• 1937 - Birth of Jared Diamond, American biologist and author

• 1966 - Death of Emil Gumbel, German mathematician and pacifist (b. 1891)

• 1975 - Death of George Paget Thomson, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1892)

• 1983 - Death of Felix Bloch, Swiss-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)

• 1996 - Death of Hans List, Austrian scientist and inventor (b. 1896)

• 2008 - The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland

September 11:

• 1522 - Birth of Ulisse Aldrovandi, Italian naturalist (d. 1605)

• 1721 - Death of Rudolf Jakob Camerarius, German botanist and physician (b. 1665)

• 1760 - Death of Louis Godin, French astronomer (b. 1704)

• 1798 - Birth of Franz Ernst Neumann, German mineralogist and physicist (d. 1895)

• 1915 - The Pennsylvania Railroad begins electrified commuter rail service between Paoli and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, using overhead AC trolley wires for powe

• 1940 - George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer

• 1951 - Birth of Richard D. Gill, British-Dutch mathematician

September 12:

• 1725 - Birth of Guillaume Le Gentil, French astronomer (d. 1792)

• 1897 - Birth of Irène Joliot-Curie, French physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (d. 1956)

• 1906 - The Newport Transporter Bridge is opened in Newport, South Wales by Viscount Tredegar

• 1923 - Death of Jules Violle, French physicist and inventor (b. 1841)

• 1927 - Death of Sarah Frances Whiting, American physicist and astronomer (b. 1847)

• 1933 - Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction

• 1958 - Jack Kilby demonstrates the first integrated circuit

• 1961 - Death of Carl Hermann, German physicist (b. 1898)

September 13:

• 1851 - Birth of Walter Reed, American physician and biologist (d. 1902)

• 1873 - Birth of Constantin Carathéodory, Greek mathematician (d. 1950)

• 1886 - Birth of Sir Robert Robinson, British chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1975)

• 1887 - Birth of Lavoslav Ruzicka, Croatian chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1976)

• 1898 - Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film

• 1948 - Birth of Dimitri Nanopoulos, Greek physicist

• 1949 - Death of August Krogh, Danish zoophysiologist, Nobel laureate (b. 1874)

• 1956 - IBM introduces the first computer that had a disk storage unit, the IBM 305 RAMAC

• 2004 - Death of Luis E. Miramontes, Mexican chemist, co-inventor of the combined oral contraceptive pill (b. 1925)

September 14:

• 1486 - Birth of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, German alchemist (d. 1535)

• 1712 - Death of Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Italian-born astronomer (b. 1625)

• 1713 - Birth of Johann Kies, German mathematician (d. 1781)

• 1752 - The British Empire adopts the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days (the previous day was September 2)

• 1769 - Birth of Alexander von Humboldt, German naturalist and explorer (d. 1859

• 1837 - Birth of Nikolai Bugaev, Russian mathematician (d. 1903)

• 1849 - Birth of Ivan Pavlov, Russian scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1936)

• 1879 - Death of Bernhard von Cotta, German geologist (b. 1808)

• 1920 - Birth of Alberto Calderón, Argentine mathematician (d. 1998)

September 15:

• 1596 - Death of Leonhard Rauwolf, German physician and botanist

• 1828 - Birth of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov, Russian chemist (d. 1886)

• 1830 - The Liverpool to Manchester railway line opens

• 1852 - Birth of Edward Bouchet, American physicist (d. 1918)

• 1883 - Birth of Esteban Terradas i Illa, Spanish mathematician and engineer (d. 1950)

• 1926 - Birth of Jean-Pierre Serre, French mathematician

• 1929 - Birth of Murray Gell-Mann, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1947 - RCA releases the 12AX7 vacuum tube

• 1981 - The John Bull becomes the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world when the Smithsonian Institution operates it under its own power outside Washington, DC

September 16:

• 1666 - Birth of Antoine Parent, French mathematician (d. 1716)

• 1725 - Birth of Nicolas Desmarest, French geologist (d. 1815)

• 1736 - Death of Gabriel Fahrenheit, German physicist (b. 1686)

• 1925 - Death of Alexander Alexandrovich Friedman, Russian physicist (b. 1888)

September 17:

• 1677 - Birth of Stephen Hales, English physiologist, chemist, and inventor (d. 1761)

• 1743 - Birth of Marquis de Condorcet, French mathematician (d. 1794)

• 1683 - Antonie van Leeuwenhoek writes a letter to the Royal Society describing "animalcules": the first known description of bacteria

• 1826 - Birth of Bernhard Riemann, German mathematician (d. 1866)

• 1836 - Death of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, French botanist (b. 1748)

• 1976 - The first Space Shuttle, Enterprise, is unveiled by NASA

September 18:

• 1752 - Birth of Adrien-Marie Legendre, French mathematician (d. 1833)

• 1783 - Death of Leonhard Euler, Swiss mathematician (b. 1707)

• 1819 - Birth of Léon Foucault, French physicist (d. 1868)

• 1891 - Death of William Ferrel, American mathematician (b. 1817)

• 1896 - Death of Hippolyte Fizeau, French physicist (b. 1819)

• 1907 - Birth of Edwin McMillan, Nobel laureate (d. 1991)

• 1959 - Vanguard 3 is launched into Earth orbit

• 1967 - Death of John Cockcroft, British physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1897)

• 1977 - Death of Paul Bernays, Swiss mathematician (b. 1888)

• 1984 - Joe Kittinger completes the first solo balloon crossing of the Atlantic

September 19:

• 1693 - Death of Janez Vajkard Valvasor, Slovenian polymath (b. 1641)

• 1710 - Death of Ole Rømer, Danish astronomer (b. 1644)

• 1749 - Birth of Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, French mathematician (d. 1822)

• 1843 - Death of Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, French scientist (b. 1792)

• 1888 - Birth of J. W. Alexander, American mathematician (d. 1971)

• 1926 - Birth of Masatoshi Koshiba, Japanese physicist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1957 - First American underground nuclear bomb test

• 1995 - Death of Orville Redenbacher, American botanist and businessman (b. 1907)

September 20:

• 1633 - Galileo Galilei is tried before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for teaching that the Earth orbits the Sun

• 1815 - Death of Nicolas Desmarest, French geologist (b. 1725)

• 1842 - Birth of James Dewar, Scottish chemist (d. 1923)

• 1884 - Death of Leopold Fitzinger, Austrian zoologist (b. 1802)

• 1996 - Death of Paul Erdős, Hungarian mathematician (b. 1913)

September 21:

• 1576 - Death of Gerolamo Cardano, Italian mathematician (b. 1501)

• 1853 - Birth of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1926)

• 1866 - Birth of Charles Nicolle, French bacteriologist, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (d. 1936)

• 1874 - Death of Jean-Baptiste Élie de Beaumont, French geologist (b. 1794)

• 1917 - Birth of Phyllis Nicolson, British mathematician (d. 1968)

• 1918 - Birth of John Gofman, American Manhattan Project scientist and advocate (d. 2007)

• 1919 - Birth of Mario Bunge, Argentine philosopher and physicist

• 1926 - Birth of Donald A. Glaser, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 2001 - Deep Space 1 flies within 2,200 km of Comet Borrelly

• 2002 - Death of Robert L. Forward, American physicist and writer (b. 1932)

• 2003 - Galileo mission terminated by sending the probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, where it is crushed by the pressure at the lower altitudes

• 2004 - Death of Barry Noble Wakeman, American naturalist and educator (b. 1939)

September 22:

• 1703 - Death of Vincenzo Viviani, Italian mathematician and scientist (b. 1622)

• 1715 - Birth of Jean-Étienne Guettard, French physician and scientist (d. 1786)

• 1717 - Birth of Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin, Swedish astronomer (d. 1783)

• 1741 - Birth of Peter Simon Pallas, German zoologist (d. 1811)

• 1765 - Birth of Paolo Ruffini, Italian mathematician (d. 1822)

• 1777 - Death of John Bartram, American botanist (b. 1699)

• 1791 - Birth of Michael Faraday, English scientist (d. 1867)

• 1888 - The first issue of National Geographic Magazine is published

• 1901 - Birth of Charles B. Huggins, Canadian-born scientist, Nobel laureate (d. 1997)

• 1912 - Birth of Herbert Mataré, German physicist and European co-inventor of the transistor

• 1922 - Birth of Chen Ning Yang, Chinese-born physicist, Nobel laureate

• 1956 - Death of Frederick Soddy, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1877)

September 23:

• 1773 - Death of Johann Ernst Gunnerus, Norwegian bishop and botanist (b. 1718)
• 1791 - Birth of Johann Franz Encke, German astronomer (d. 1865)
• 1819 - Birth of Hippolyte Fizeau, French physicist (d. 1896)
• 1846 - Neptune is discovered by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and British astronomer John Couch Adams; the discovery is verified by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle
• 1877 - Death of Urbain Le Verrier, French mathematician (b. 1811)
• 1884 - Herman Hollerith patents his mechanical tabulating machine
• 1902 - Birth of Su Buqing, Chinese mathematician and educator (d. 2003)
• 1915 - Birth of Clifford Shull, American physicist, Nobel Laureate (d. 2001)
• 1929 - Death of Richard Adolf Zsigmondy, Austrian-born chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1865)
• 1971 - Death of J. W. Alexander, American mathematician (b. 1888)
• 1992 - Scientists discover normal body temperature is not always 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit

September 24:

• 1501 - Birth of Gerolamo Cardano, Italian mathematician (d. 1576)

• 1541 - Death of Paracelsus, Swiss alchemist (b. 1493)

• 1742 - Death of Johann Matthias Hase, German scientist (b. 1684)

• 1801 - Birth of Mikhail Vasilievich Ostrogradsky, Ukrainian scientist (d. 1862)

• 1802 - Birth of Adolphe d'Archiac, French paleontologist and geologist (d. 1868)

• 1870 - Birth of Georges Claude, French chemist and inventor (d. 1960)

• 1945 - Death of Hans Geiger, German physicist (b. 1882)

• 1950 - Forest fires black out the sun over portions of Canada and New England. A Blue moon (in the astronomical sense) is seen as far away as Europe

• 1993 - Death of Bruno Pontecorvo, Italian physicist (b. 1913)

September 25:

• 1644 - Birth of Ole Rømer, Danish astronomer (d. 1710)

• 1777 - Death of Johann Heinrich Lambert, German scientist (b. 1728)

• 1866 - Birth of Thomas Hunt Morgan, American geneticist, Nobel laureate (d. 1945)

• 1986 - Death of Nikolay Nikolayevich Semyonov, Russian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1896)

• 2008 - China launches the spacecraft Shenzhou 7

September 26:

• 1580 - Sir Francis Drake finishes his circumnavigation of the Earth

• 1716 - Death of Antoine Parent, French mathematician (b. 1666)

• 1802 - Baron Jurij Vega, Slovenian mathematician and military officer (b. 1754)

• 1868 - Death of August Ferdinand Möbius, German mathematician and astronomer (b. 1790)

• 1877 - Death of Hermann Grassmann, German mathematician and physicist (b. 1809)

• 1887 - Birth of Sir Barnes Wallis, English scientist, engineer and inventor (d. 1979)

• 1951 - Death of Hans Cloos, German geologist (b. 1885)

• 1976 - Death of Lavoslav Ružička, Croatian chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1887)

• 1978 - Death of Manne Siegbahn, Swedish physicist, Nobel laureate (b. 1886)

September 27:

• 1719 - Birth of Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, German mathematician (d. 1800)

• 1735 - Death of Peter Artedi, Swedish naturalist (b. 1705)

• 1783 - Death of Étienne Bézout, French mathematician (b. 1730)

• 1818 - Birth of Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe, German chemist (d. 1884)

• 1838 - Death of Bernard Courtois, French chemist (b. 1777)

• 1842 - Birth of Alphonse Francois Renard, Belgian geologist (d. 1903)

• 1843 - Birth of Gaston Tarry, French mathematician (d. 1913)

• 1879 - Birth of Hans Hahn, Austrian mathematician (d. 1934)

• 1905 - The physics journal Annalen der Physik published Albert Einstein's paper "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", introducing the equation E=mc²

• 1911 - Death of Auguste Michel-Lévy, French geologist (b. 1844)

• 1919 - Birth of James H. Wilkinson, American mathematician (d. 1986)

• 1924 - Birth of Fred Singer, American scientist

• 1933 - Birth of Rodney Cotterill, Danish-English physicist (d. 2007)

• 1940 - Death of Julius Wagner-Jauregg, Austrian neuroscientist, Nobel laureate (b. 1857)

• 1972 - Death of S. R. Ranganathan, Indian mathematician (b. 1892)

September 28:

• 1605 - Birth of Ismaël Bullialdus, French astronomer (d. 1694)

• 1694 - Death of Gabriel Mouton, French scientist (b. 1618)

• 1852 - Birth of Henri Moissan, French chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1907)

• 1889 - The first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) defines the length of a meter as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum with ten percent iridium, measured at the melting point of ice

• 1895 - Death of Louis Pasteur, French scientist (b. 1822)

• 1928 - Sir Alexander Fleming notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin

• 1979 - Death of John Herbert Chapman, Canadian physicist (b. 1921)

• 2008 - SpaceX launches the first ever private spacecraft, the Falcon 1 into orbit

September 29:

• 1561 - Birth of Adriaan van Roomen, Flemish mathematician (d. 1615)

• 1803 - Birth of Jacques Charles François Sturm, French mathematician (d. 1850)

• 1901 - Birth of Enrico Fermi, Italian physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1954)

• 1920 - Birth of Peter D. Mitchell, English chemist, Nobel laureate (d. 1992)

• 1931 - Birth of James Watson Cronin, American nuclear physicist, Nobel laureate

• 1957 - 20 MCi (740 petabecquerels) of radioactive material is released in an explosion at the Soviet Mayak nuclear plant at Chelyabinsk

• 2004 - The asteroid 4179 Toutatis passes within four lunar distances of Earth

September 30:

• 1550 - Birth of Michael Maestlin, German mathematician (d. 1631)

• 1870 - Birth of Jean Baptiste Perrin, French physicist, Nobel laureate (d. 1942)

• 1882 - The world's first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States

• 1905 - Birth of Nevill Francis Mott, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1996)

• 1939 - Birth of Jean-Marie Lehn, French chemist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1943 - Birth of Johann Deisenhofer, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate

• 1994 - Death of Andre Michael Lwoff, French microbiologist, Nobel laureate (b. 1902)

• 2004 - The first images of a live giant squid in its natural habitat are taken 600 miles south of Tokyo