1903 in science

Overview of the events of 1903 in science

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1903 in science

1902

1904

Fields

* Archaeology

Technology

* Sustainable energy research
* Transportation technology

Social sciences

* Psychology
* Governance and policy studies

Paleontology

* Dinosaurs' extinction

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* Tornado research

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The year 1903 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

## Aeronautics

[edit]

December 17 – Wright brothers' first flight

* June 27–19-year-old American socialite Aida de Acosta becomes the first woman to fly a powered aircraft solo when she pilots Santos-Dumont's motorized dirigible, "No. 9", from Paris to Château de Bagatelle in France.[1]
* December 17 – First documented, successful, controlled, powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft with a petrol engine by Orville Wright in the Wright Flyer at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.
* Konstantin Tsiolkovsky begins a series of papers discussing the use of liquid fuel rockets to reach outer space, space suits, and colonization of the Solar System.

## Biology

[edit]

* The type specimen of the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is described by Carl Chun.[2]
* Fauna and Flora International is founded as the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire by a group of British naturalists and American statesmen in Africa.

## Chemistry

[edit]

* Peter Cooper Hewitt demonstrates the mercury-vapour lamp.
* Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet invents chromatography, an important analytic technique.
* The International Committee of Atomic Weights publishes the inaugural atomic weights report.

## Mathematics

[edit]

* October – Frank Nelson Cole demonstrates that the Mersenne number 267-1, or M67, is composite by factoring it as 193,707,721 * 761,838,257,287.[3]
* Fast Fourier transform algorithm presented by Carle David Tolmé Runge.[citation needed]
* Edmund Georg Hermann Landau gives considerably simpler proof of the prime number theorem.

## Physics

[edit]

* George Darwin and John Joly claim that radioactivity is partially responsible for the Earth's heat.
* Prosper-René Blondlot claims to have detected N rays.

## Physiology and medicine

[edit]

* March–April – David Bruce identifies the parasitic Trypanosoma protist as the source of African trypanosomiasis ("sleeping sickness").[4]
* May 10 – Antoni Leśniowski publishes the first article implicating what will later be known as Crohn's disease, in the Polish weekly medical newspaper Medycyna.[5]
* Alfred Walter Campbell divides the cytoarchitecture of the human brain into 14 areas.[6]
* Ernest Fourneau synthesizes and patents Amylocaine, the first synthetic local anesthetic, under the name Stovaine at the Pasteur Institute.[7]
* Willem Einthoven discovers electrocardiography (ECG/EKG)
* Percy Furnivall carries out the first known case of cardiac surgery in Britain.
* The 12th and final edition of Dr Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis: eine Klinisch-Forensische Studie ("Sexual Psychopathy: a Clinical-Forensic Study") published during the author's lifetime introduces the term paedophilia erotica.
* Formal opening of the Johnston Laboratories at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, England.

## Technology

[edit]

* November – Windscreen wiper for automobiles is first patented by Mary Anderson in the United States.
* December 15 – Italo Marchiony from New York City patents an improved design of apparatus for baking ice cream cones.[8]
* The first diesel-powered ships are launched, both for inland waters: Petite-Pierre in France, powered by Dyckhoff-built diesels, and the tanker Vandal in Russia, powered by Swedish-built diesels with an electrical transmission.
* Norwegian engineer Ægidius Elling builds the first gas turbine to generate power, using a centrifugal compressor.[9]
* Laminated glass is invented by Edouard Benedictus.
* Baker valve gear for steam locomotives is first patented in the United States.[10]
* The Lune Valley boiler is patented by John G. A. Kitchen and Ludlow Perkins.[11]

## Institutions

[edit]

* June 28 – Deutsches Museum founded in Munich.[12]

## Awards

[edit]

* Nobel Prizes
* Physics – Antoine Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, and Marie Curie[13]
* Chemistry – Svante August Arrhenius
* Medicine – Niels Ryberg Finsen

## Births

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* January 22 – Fritz Houtermans (died 1966), Danzig-born Dutch physicist.
* January 27 – John Eccles (died 1997), Australian-born psychologist.
* January 28 – Kathleen Lonsdale, née Yardley (died 1971), Irish-born crystallographer.
* February 2 – Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (died 1996), Dutch mathematician.[14]
* February 22 – Frank P. Ramsey (died 1930), English mathematician.
* April 6 – "Doc" Harold Eugene Edgerton ("Papa Flash", died 1990), American electrical engineer.
* April 9 – Gregory Goodwin Pincus (died 1967), American biologist, co-inventor of the combined oral contraceptive pill.
* April 25 – Andrey Kolmogorov (died 1987), Russian mathematician.
* May 2 – Benjamin Spock (died 1998), American pediatrician and writer.
* May 18 – Frits Warmolt Went (died 1990), Dutch-born American botanist.
* June 14 – Alonzo Church (died 1995), American mathematician.
* July 16 – Irmgard Flügge-Lotz (died 1974), German-American mathematician and aerospace engineer
* August 7 – Louis Leakey (died 1972), British East African paleoanthropologist.
* October 4 – Cyril Stanley Smith (died 1992), English-born metallurgist.
* October 5 – M. King Hubbert (died 1989), American geophysicist.
* October 10 – Bei Shizhang (died 2009), Chinese biologist and founder of the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
* October 11 – Kazimierz Kordylewski (died 1981), Polish astronomer.
* November 7 – Konrad Lorenz (died 1989), Austrian zoologist.
* November 27 – Lars Onsager (died 1976), Norwegian-born chemist.
* December 19 – George Davis Snell (died 1996), American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist.[15]
* December 28 – John von Neumann (died 1957), Hungarian-born mathematician.

## Deaths

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* February 1 – Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet (born 1819), Anglo-Irish mathematician and physicist.
* February 7 – James Glaisher (born 1809), English meteorologist and balloonist.
* March 28 – Émile Baudot (born 1845), French telegraph engineer.
* April 28 – J. Willard Gibbs (born 1839), American physical chemist.
* June 14 – Carl Gegenbaur (born 1826), German anatomist.[16]
* July 21 – Henri Alexis Brialmont (born 1821), Belgian military engineer.
* August 2 – Edmond Nocard (born 1850), French veterinarian and microbiologist.
* August 27 – Kusumoto Ine (born 1827), pioneering Japanese woman physician.
* November 8 – Vasily Dokuchaev (born 1846), Russian geologist.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "Women in Transportation – Changing America's History: Reference Materials" (PDF). United States Department of Transportation. March 1998. p. 10. Retrieved 2012-08-21.
2. ^ Chun, Karl (1903). Aus den tiefen des weltmeeres [From the depths of the ocean] (in German). Jena: G. Fischer. p. 88\. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.14876.
3. ^ At a meeting of the American Mathematical Society in New York City.
4. ^ Duggan, A. J. (1977). "Bruce and the African Trypanosomes". The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 26 (5 Pt 2 Suppl): 1080–3\. doi:10.4269/ajtmh.1977.26.1080. PMID 20787.[permanent dead link]
5. ^ Lichtarowicz, A. M.; Mayberry, J. F. (August 1988). "Antoni Lésniowski and his contribution to regional enteritis (Crohn's disease)". Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 81 (8): 468–470\. doi:10.1177/014107688808100817. PMC 1291720. PMID 3047387.
6. ^ Campbell, A. W. (1903). "Histological studies on cerebral localisation". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. 72 (477–486): 488–492\. doi:10.1098/rspl.1903.0077. S2CID 145403326.477–486&rft.pages=488-492&rft.date=1903&rft_id=info:doi/10.1098/rspl.1903.0077&rft_id=https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:145403326#id-name=S2CID&rft.aulast=Campbell&rft.aufirst=A.+W.&rft_id=https://zenodo.org/record/1571278&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:1903+in+science" class="Z3988">
7. ^ "Stovaïne, anesthésique local". Bull. Sc. pharmacolog. 10 (1904): 141.
8. ^ US patent 746971, Italo Marchiony, "Mold", issued 1903-12-15
9. ^ "The History of Engines – How Engines Work. Part 2: A Short History and Timeline of Gas Turbine Engines". About.com.Inventors. Archived from the original on 2019-09-25. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
10. ^ Blake, LeRoy W. (May–June 1979). "Remembering the A.D. Baker Company". Farm Collector: 4. Archived from the original on 2012-05-10. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
11. ^ Wilson, Paul N. (1972). "J. G. A. Kitchen, 1869-1940, and his inventions". Transactions of the Newcomen Society. 45: 15–43\. doi:10.1179/tns.1972.002.
12. ^ "History of the Museum". Deutsches Museum. Retrieved 2023-02-16.
13. ^ "BBC – History – Marie Curie". www.bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 20 January 2020.
14. ^ Sets and Extensions in the Twentieth Century. Elsevier. 2012. p. 175\. ISBN 9780080930664.
15. ^ "George Davis Snell – American geneticist". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
16. ^ "Gegenbaur, Carl (1826-1903)". catalogue.bnf.fr (in French). Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Retrieved 6 February 2021.

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