1938 in science

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The year 1938 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Contents

1 Astronomy
2 Biology
3 Chemistry
4 Computer science
5 Mathematics
6 Medicine
7 Physics
8 Awards
9 Births
10 Deaths
11 References

Astronomy

June 28 - A 450-ton meteorite strikes the earth in an empty field near Chicora, Pennsylvania.

Biology

December 22 - Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovers a Coelacanth, formerly seen only in fossils millions of years old, in a fisherman's catch in South Africa.
Bawden and Pirie publish the first crystal of a spherical virus, Tomato bushy stunt virus.^[1]

Chemistry

April 6 - Roy J. Plunkett of DuPont accidentally discovers polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon).
Lysergic acid diethylamide first synthesized by Albert Hofmann from ergotamine.^[2]

Computer science

Konrad Zuse in Berlin completes his Z1 computer, a floating point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, using Boolean logic and reading instructions from perforated 35 mm film.^[3]

Mathematics

Frank Benford restates the law of distribution of first digits.^[4]

Medicine

Hans Asperger first adopts the term autism in its modern sense in referring to autistic psychopaths in a lecture (in German) on child psychology.^[5]

Physics

Herbert E. Ives and G. R. Stilwell execute the Ives-Stilwell experiment, showing that ions radiate at frequencies affected by their motion.^[6]
The Vlasov equation is first proposed for description of plasma by Anatoly Vlasov.^[7]

Awards

Births

April 3 - John Darley, social psychologist.

Deaths

January 31 - Sir James Crichton-Browne, psychiatrist (b. 1840).

References

^ Bawden, F. C.; Pirie, N. W. (1938). British Journal of Experimental Pathology 19: 251.
^ Hofmann, Albert (1980). LSD — My Problem Child. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-029325-2. http://www.psychedelic-library.org/child.htm.
^ Talk given by Horst Zuse to the Computer Conservation Society at the Science Museum (London) on 18 November 2010.
^ Benford, Frank (1938). "The Law of Anomalous Numbers". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 78: 551–572. JSTOR 984802. http://www.jstor.org/stable/984802. Retrieved 2011-09-23.
^ Asperger, H. (1938). "[The psychically abnormal child]" (in German). Wiener klinische Wochenschrift 51: 1314–7.
^ Ives, Herbert E.; Stilwell, G. R. (1938). "An Experimental Study of the Rate of a Moving Atomic Clock". Journal of the Optical Society of America 28 (7): 215–19. Bibcode 1938JOSA...28..215I. doi:10.1364/JOSA.28.000215. http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=josa-28-7-215. Retrieved 2011-09-23.
^ Vlasov, A. A. (1938). "[On Vibration Properties of an Electron Gas]" (in Russian). Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics 8 (3): 444–70. http://ufn.ru/ru/articles/1967/11/f/. Retrieved 2011-09-23.