1910 in science

The year 1910 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• May 18 – Earth passes through the tail of Halley's Comet.
• Approximate date – The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram is developed by Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell.

Chemistry

• Albert Einstein and Marian Smoluchowski find the Einstein-Smoluchowski formula for the attenuation coefficient due to density fluctuations in a gas.
• Umetaro Suzuki isolates the first vitamin complex, aberic acid.^[1]
• Hoechst AG market Arsphenamine under the trade name Salvarsan, the first organic antisyphilitic, its properties having been discovered the previous fall by bacteriologist Sahachiro Hata during systematic testing in the laboratory of Paul Ehrlich; it rapidly becomes the world's most widely prescribed drug.^[2]

Mathematics

• Publication of the 1st volume of Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, one of the most important and seminal works in mathematical logic and philosophy.
• First known use of the term "Econometrics" (in cognate form), by Paweł Ciompa.^[3]

Physics

• German physicist Theodor Wulf climbs the Eiffel Tower with an electrometer and discovers the first evidence of cosmic rays.
• Hans Reissner and Gunnar Nordström define the Reissner-Nordström singularity; Hermann Weyl solves the special case for a point-body source.

Physiology and medicine

• July 15 – Publication of the eighth edition of Emil Kraepelin's Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Arzte, naming Alzheimer's disease as a variety of dementia.^[4]
• Late December – A form of pneumonic plague spreads through northeastern China, killing more than 40,000.^[5][6][7]
• Thomas Hunt Morgan discovers that genes are located on chromosomes.
• Chicago cardiologist James B. Herrick makes the first published identification of sickle cells in the blood of a patient suffering from anemia.^[8]
• Peyton Rous demonstrates that a malignant tumor can be transmitted by a virus (now known as the Rous sarcoma virus, a retrovirus).^[9][10]
• Hans Christian Jacobaeus of Sweden performs the first thoracoscopic diagnosis with a cystoscope.^[11][12]

Technology

• January 12–13 – Birth of public radio broadcasting: Lee De Forest conducts an experimental broadcast of part of a live performance of Tosca and, the next day, a performance with the participation of the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso from the stage of Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.^[13][14]
• March 28 – Henri Fabre makes the first flights in a seaplane, at Martigues, France.
• June 7 – William G. Allen of the Allen Manufacturing Company is granted a United States patent for a hex key.^[15]
• October – First publication of infrared photographs, by American optical physicist Robert W. Wood in the Royal Photographic Society's Journal.
• December 3–18 – Georges Claude demonstrates the first modern neon light at the Paris Motor Show.
• Lieutenant-Colonel Dr. George Owen Squier of the United States Army invents telephone carrier multiplexing.
• Completion of Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad's Paulinskill Viaduct on its Lackawanna Cut-Off, the world's largest reinforced concrete structure at this time, built under the supervision of Lincoln Bush, its chief engineer.^[16]

Institutions

• March 17 – The Smithsonian Institution's Natural History Building, later the National Museum of Natural History, opens its doors to the public in Washington, D.C.^[17]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Johannes Diderik van der Waals
  • Chemistry – Otto Wallach
  • Medicine – Albrecht Kossel

Births

• January 20 – Friederike Victoria Gessner, later Joy Adamson (died 1980), wildlife conservationist.
• February 9 – Jacques Monod (died 1976), biochemist, winner of Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.
• February 13 – William Bradford Shockley (died 1989), physicist.
• March 11 – Robert Havemann (died 1982), chemist.
• May 3 – Helen M. Duncan (died 1971), geologist and paleontologist
• May 12 – Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (died 1994), chemist.
• June 11 – Jacques-Yves Cousteau (died 1997), oceanographer.
• July 16 – David Lack (died 1973), ornithologist.
• October 11 – Cahit Arf (died 1997), mathematician.
• October 31 – Victor Rothschild (died 1990), polymath.
• December 24 – William Hayward Pickering (died 2004), head of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Deaths

• May 10 – Stanislao Cannizzaro (born 1826), Italian chemist.
• May 12 – William Huggins (born 1824), English astronomer.
• May 27 – Robert Koch (born 1843), German bacteriologist.
• July 4 – Giovanni Schiaparelli (born 1835), Italian astronomer.
• August 12 – Florence Nightingale (born 1820), English nurse.

References