1903 in science

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

Aeronautics

December 17 - Wright brothers' first flight

• December 17 - First documented, successful, controlled, powered flight of an 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

• The type specimen of the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is described by Carl Chun.
• Formal opening of the Johnston Laboratories at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool, England.

Chemistry

• Peter Cooper Hewitt demonstrates the mercury-vapour lamp.
• Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet invents chromatography, an important analytic technique

Mathematics

• Fast Fourier Transform algorithm presented by Carle David Tolme Runge.
• Edmund Georg Hermann Landau gives considerably simpler proof of the prime number theorem.

Medicine

• March–April - David Bruce identifies the parasitic Trypanosoma protist as the source of African trypanosomiasis ("sleeping sickness").^[1]
• 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.^[2]
• Ernest Fourneau synthesizes and patents Amylocaine, the first synthetic local anesthetic, under the name Stovaine at the Pasteur Institute.^[3]
• Willem Einthoven discovers electrocardiography (ECG/EKG)

Physics

• George Darwin and John Joly claim that radioactivity is partially responsible for the Earth's heat.

Technology

• 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.^[4]
• Laminated glass is invented by Edouard Benedictus.
• The Lune Valley boiler is patented by John G. A. Kitchen and Ludlow Perkins.^[5]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Antoine Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, and Marie Curie
  • Chemistry - Svante August Arrhenius
  • Medicine - Niels Ryberg Finsen

Births

• January 22 - Fritz Houtermans (died 1966), physicist.
• January 27 - John Carew Eccles (died 1997), psychologist.
• January 28 - Kathleen Lonsdale, née Yardley (died 1971), Irish-born crystallographer.
• February 2 - Bartel Leendert van der Waerden (died 1996), mathematician.
• February 22 - Frank P. Ramsey (died 1930), mathematician.
• April 6 - Doc Edgerton, (died 1990), professor electrical engineer.
• April 25 - Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (died 1987), mathematician.
• May 2 - Benjamin Spock (died 1998), pediatrician, writer.
• June 14 - Alonzo Church (died 1995), American mathematician.
• August 7 - Louis Leakey (died 1972), British archaeologist.
• October 5 - M. King Hubbert (died 1989), geophysicist.
• November 7 - Konrad Lorenz (died 1989), zoologist.
• November 27 - Lars Onsager (died 1976), chemist.
• December 28 - John von Neumann (died 1957), mathematician.

Deaths

• February 1 - George Gabriel Stokes (born 1819), mathematician and physicist.
• March 28 - Emile Baudot (born 1845), telegraph engineer.
• April 28 - Willard Gibbs (born 1839), physical chemist.
• July 21 - Henri Alexis Brialmont (born 1821), military engineer.

References