1946 in science

The year 1946 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• November 10 - Peter Scott opens the Slimbridge Wetland Reserve in England.
• Karl von Frisch publishes "Die Tänze der Bienen" ("The dances of the bees").^[1]

Computer science

• February 14–15 - ENIAC, the first non-classified all-electronic Turing complete computer, built under the direction of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, is announced and dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.^[2] It is programmable by plugboard and uses conditional branching.
• December 11 - Frederick Williams receives a patent for a random-access memory device.^[3]

Medicine

• July 14 - Dr Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is first published in New York; it becomes one of the biggest best-sellers of all time.^[4]
• Harold Gillies begins to perform sex reassignment surgery on Michael Dillon, including the first female-to-male transsexual phalloplasty.^[5]
• Chance Brothers of Smethwick, England, produce the first all-glass syringe with interchangeable barrel and plunger, allowing easy mass-sterilisation of components.
• Chemotherapy - Alfred Gilman and Louis S Goodman

Physics

• January 1 - Atomic Energy Research Establishment established at Harwell, Oxfordshire under John Cockroft.
• The BBGKY hierarchy of equations for s-particle distribution functions is applied to the derivation of kinetic equations by Nikolay Bogolyubov in a paper received in July 1945 and published in 1946 in Russian^[6] and in English.^[7] The related kinetic transport theory is considered by John Gamble Kirkwood in a paper^[8] received in October 1945 and published in March 1946. The first paper by Max Born and Herbert S. Green considering a general kinetic theory of liquids is received in February 1946 and published on 31 December 1946.^[9]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes^[10]
  • Physics - Percy Williams Bridgman
  • Chemistry - James B. Sumner, John Howard Northrop, Wendell Meredith Stanley
  • Medicine - Hermann Joseph Muller

Births

• May 11 - Robert Jarvik, co-inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
• October 14 - Kay Redfield Jamison, clinical psychologist
• June 24 - Ellison Onizuka (died 1986), astronaut
• July 2 - Richard Axel, physiologist, Nobel prize winner
• September 7 - Francisco Varela (died 2001), biologist and philosopher
• September 28 - Morinobu Endo, chemist
• December 31 - Roy Porter (died 2002), medical historian

Deaths

• March 8 - Frederick W. Lanchester (born 1868), automotive engineer.
• March 23 - Gilbert N. Lewis (born 1875), chemist; first to isolate deuterium.
• March 26 - Gerhard Heilman (born 1859), paleo-ornithologist.
• May 2 - Simon Flexner (born 1863), pathologist and bacteriologist.
• June 14 - John Logie Baird (born 1888), inventor.
• August 13 - H. G. Wells (born 1866), scientific populariser.
• September 16 - James Hopwood Jeans (born 1877), mathematician and scientist.
• October 2 - Ignacy Mościcki (born 1867), chemist and President of Poland.
• October 4 - Barney Oldfield (born 1878), automobile racer.
• Israel Aharoni (born 1882), zoologist.

References