1928 in science

The year 1928 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Anthropology

• American anthropologist Margaret Mead publishes Coming of Age in Samoa, "a psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilization".

Archaeology

• The old Canaanite city of Ugarit is rediscovered.

Biology

• January – Frederick Griffith reports the results of Griffith's experiment, indirectly proving the existence of DNA.^[1][2]
• September 3 – Alexander Fleming, at St Mary's Hospital, London, accidentally rediscovers the antibiotic Penicillin, forgotten since Ernest Duchesne's original discovery in 1896.^[3][4]
• American biogerontologist Raymond Pearl publishes his Rate of Living Hypothesis, proposing that lifespan is shorter in animals with faster metabolisms.^[5]

Computer science

• April – Leslie Comrie publishes an article "On the Construction of Tables by Interpolation", describing the use of punched card equipment for interpolating tables of data, and becomes the first to use such equipment for scientific calculations, using Fourier synthesis to compute the principal terms in the motion of the Moon for 1935–2000.

History of science

• Florian Cajori begins publication of A History of Mathematical Notations.

Mathematics

• David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann publish Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik, a pioneering elementary text in first-order logic stating the Entscheidungsproblem.^[6]
• John von Neumann publishes Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele, a text in game theory.

Medicine

• October 12 – An 'iron lung' medical ventilator designed by Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw, Jr., is used for the first time, at Boston Children's Hospital in the United States for treatment of poliomyelitis.
• Dementia pugilistica is first described by forensic pathologist Dr. Harrison Stanford Martland, chief medical examiner of Essex County, New Jersey.^[7]

Physics

• February 28 – C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan discover Raman scattering in liquids.^[8]
• Paul Dirac proposes the Dirac equation as a relativistic equation of motion for the wavefunction of the electron,^[9] leading him to predict the existence of the positron, the electron's antiparticle.^[10]

Technology

• February 8 – British inventor John Logie Baird broadcasts a transatlantic television signal from London to Hartsdale, New York.^[11]
• June 11 – Hungarian inventor Kálmán Tihanyi files patents in Germany, the United Kingdom and France for a cathode ray television transmission system.^[12]
• July 3
  • British inventor John Logie Baird demonstrates the world's first color television transmission, using scanning discs.^[13]
  • Ulster-born engineer Harry Ferguson obtains a British patent for his three-point linkage for tractors.^[14]
• July 7 – The first machine-sliced and machine-wrapped loaf of bread is sold in Chillicothe, Missouri, using Otto Frederick Rohwedder's technology.
• September 3 – Philo Farnsworth demonstrates to the Press the world's first working all-electronic television system, employing electronic scanning in both the pickup and display devices.^[15][16]
• December – Completion of the Maurzyce Bridge near Łowicz in central Poland, the world's first road bridge of wholly welded construction, designed by Stefan Bryła.^[17][18][19]

Publications

• Arthur Eddington publishes the popular text The Nature of the Physical World in the United Kingdom, including a statement of the infinite monkey theorem.^[20]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Owen Willans Richardson
  • Chemistry – Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus
  • Medicine – Charles Jules Henri Nicolle

Births

• January 4 – Henry T. Lynch, American cancer geneticist.
• March 8 – Gerald Bull (killed 1990), Canadian ballistics engineer.
• March 28 – Alexander Grothendieck (died 2014), German-born French mathematician, pioneer of modern algebraic geometry.
• April 6 – James Watson, American geneticist.
• April 20 – Charles David Keeling (died 2005), American atmospheric chemist, geochemist and oceanograper.
• May 4 – Bill Mollison (died 2016), Australian biologist, pioneer of permaculture.
• May 23 – Jean E. Sammet, American computer programmer.
• May 26 – Jack Kevorkian (died 2011), American pathologist, advocate of euthanasia.
• June 13 – John Forbes Nash, Jr. (died 2015), American mathematician, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
• June 28 – Harold Evans, English newspaper editor.
• September 7 – Donald Henderson (died 2016), American epidemiologist.
• October 25 – Peter Naur (died 2016), Danish data scientist.

Deaths

• February 4 – Hendrik Lorentz (born 1853), Dutch physicist and Nobel laureate.
• March 19 – David Ferrier (born 1843), Scottish-born neurologist.
• March 21 – E. Walter Maunder (born 1851), English astronomer.
• May 21 – Hideyo Noguchi (born 1876), Japanese bacteriologist.
• August 30 – Wilhelm Wien (born 1864), German physicist.
• October 29 – John Macintyre (born 1857), Scottish laryngologist and pioneer radiographer.

References