1904 in science

The year 1904 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• Edward Walter Maunder plots the first sunspot "butterfly diagram".
• The sixth moon of Jupiter, later called Himalia, discovered at Lick Observatory.

Mathematics

• Henri Poincaré discovers the Poincaré sphere, leading him to formulate the Poincaré conjecture.
• Helge von Koch describes the "Koch snowflake", one of the earliest fractal curves described.^[1][2]
• Charles Spearman develops his rank correlation coefficient.^[3]
• Ernst Zermelo formulates the axiom of choice.^[4]

Medicine

• Epinephrine first artificially synthesized by Friedrich Stolz.
• Antoni Leśniowski presents to a meeting of the Warsaw Medical Society a surgical specimen of an inflammatory tumour of the terminal ileum with a fistula to the ascending colon, consistent with what will later become known as Crohn's disease.^[5]

Physics

• Vacuum tube invented by John Ambrose Fleming.
• James H. Jeans's The Dynamical Theory of Gases is published in Cambridge.
• J. J. Thomson proposes the plum pudding model for the atom.
• Hantaro Nagaoka develops the Saturnian model for the atom.

Technology

• The first diesel engined submarine, the Z, is built in France.
• The Heckelphone variety of oboe is invented by Wilhelm Heckel and his sons.
• The sleeve valve is invented by Charles Yale Knight.
• Rue Franklin Apartments, Paris, are completed by Auguste Perret and his brother Gustave, an early example of an exposed reinforced concrete frame building.^[6]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh
  • Chemistry - Sir William Ramsay
  • Medicine - Ivan Pavlov

Births

• January 26 - Ancel Keys, (died 2004) American nutritionist.
• March 13 - René Dumont (died 2001), French agronomist.
• March 20 - B. F. Skinner (died 1990), American behavioral psychologist.
• April 11 - Arthur Mourant (died 1994), Jersiais hematologist.
• April 22 - J. Robert Oppenheimer (died 1967), American physicist.
• July 5 - Ernst Mayr (died 2005), German-born evolutionary biologist.
• August 28 - Secondo Campini (died 1980), Italian jet pioneer.
• November 11 - J. H. C. Whitehead (died 1960), British mathematician.

Deaths

• May 10 - Henry Morton Stanley (born 1841), Welsh-born explorer and journalist.

References