1954 in science

none February 2012 1954 science 1954 The year 1954 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below. Astronomy November 30 – In Sylacauga, Alabama, an 8.5 pound sulfide meteorite crashes through a roof and hits Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges in her living room after bouncing off her radio, giving her a bad bruise; the first known modern case of a human being hit by a space rock. Biology January 10 – Last confirmed specimen of a Caspian tiger is killed, in the valley of the Sumbar River in the Kopet Dag Mountains of Turkmenistan.Dement'yev and Rustamov The Red Data Book of Turkmenistan Turkmenistan Publishing House 1985 Ashgabat Daniel I. Arnon demonstrates in the laboratory the chemical function of photosynthesis in chloroplasts.Arnon, Daniel I. Allen, Mary B. Whatley, F. R. Photosynthesis by Isolated Chloroplasts Nature 174 1954 394–6 4426 10.1038/174394a0 13194001 1954Natur.174..394A 2462316 Laurence William L. https://www.nytimes.com/1954/12/30/archives/sun-is-harnessed-to-create-food-science-team-on-the-coast.html Sun is Harnessed to Create Food: Science Team on the Coast Duplicates Photosynthesis Outside Plants' Cells The New York Times December 30, 1954 July 18, 2010 Heinz Sielmann makes the pioneering nature documentary about woodpeckers, Zimmerleute des Waldes ("Carpenters of the forest"). Eduard Paul Tratz and Heinz Heck propose the species name bonobo for what was previously known as the pygmy chimpanzee.de Waal, Frans B. M. Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press 2002 0-674-00460-4 51 Frans de Waal registration https://archive.org/details/treeoforiginwhat00waal/page/51 Chemistry September – The Wittig reaction is reported by German chemist Georg Wittig. December – Publication of the first analysis of the three-dimensional molecular structure of vitamin B12 by a group including Dorothy Hodgkin, and utilising computer analysis provided by Kenneth Nyitray Trueblood.Brink, Clara Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot Lindsey, June June Lindsey Pickworth, Jenny Robertson, John H. White, John G. December 25, 1954 X-ray Crystallographic Evidence on the Structure of Vitamin B12 Nature 174 1169–117 10.1038/1741169a0 4443 1954Natur.174.1169B 13223773 4207158 Jenny P. Glusker Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994) Protein Science 1994 3 12 2465–2469 10.1002/pro.5560031233 7757003 2142778 Strychnine total synthesis is first achieved in the laboratory by Robert Burns Woodward's team at Harvard.Nicolaou, K. C.; Sorensen, E. J. (1996). Classics in Total Synthesis: Targets, Strategies, Methods. Wiley. 978-3-527-29231-8.Nicolaou, K. C.; Vourloumis, Dionisios; Winssinger, Nicolas; Baran, Phil S. The Art and Science of Total Synthesis at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2000 39 1 44-122Bonjoch Josep Sole Daniel 2000 Synthesis of Strychnine Chemical Reviews 100 9 3455–3482 10.1021/cr9902547 11777429Proudfoot John R. 2013 Reaction Schemes Visualized in Network Form: The Syntheses of Strychnine as an Example Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 53 5 1035–1042 10.1021/ci300556b 23597302 Computer science January – The TRADIC Phase One computer is completed at Bell Labs in the United States, a candidate to be regarded as the first transistor computer.Irvine M. M. Early Digital Computers at Bell Telephone Laboratories IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 23 3 22–42 2001 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/85.948904 2009-06-07 10.1109/85.948904 subscription January 7 – Georgetown–IBM experiment: the first public demonstration of a machine translation system held in New York at the head office of IBM. Geology December 31 – The first specimens of the mineral benstonite are collected by Orlando J. Benston in the Magnet Cove igneous complex of Arkansas.Benstonite http://www.mindat.org/min-626.html Mindat 2012-12-31 History of science Joseph Needham begins publication of Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press). A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard and A. R. Hall, begins publication (Oxford University Press). Mathematics January 6 – The Luhn algorithm, devised by IBM information scientist Hans Peter Luhn, is described in a United States patent.No. 2,950,048. Klaus Roth publishes a paperRoth K. F. 10.1112/S0025579300000541 Mathematika 0066435 73–79 On irregularities of distribution 1 2 1954 laying the foundations for modern discrepancy theory. Leonard Jimmie Savage publishes Foundations of Statistics, promoting Bayesian statistics. Medicine February 23 – The first mass vaccination of children against polio begins, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. August 10 – British epidemiologist Richard Doll submits a study on the risk to workers in asbestos manufacture of mortality from lung cancer.Richard Doll Mortality from lung cancer in asbestos workers British Journal of Industrial Medicine 12 1955 6 81–6 10.1136/oem.50.6.485 8329311 1035472 The first organ transplants are done in Boston and Paris. December 23 – Joseph Murray at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston carries out the first successful kidney transplant, between identical twins.Donor Of First Successful Organ Transplant Dies 56 Years Later http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/29/donor-in-1st-successful-t_n_802379.html The Huffington Post March 15, 2011 December 29, 2010 The first of the anti-psychotic phenothiazine drugs, Chlorpromazine, starts being sold under the trade names Thorazine (U.S.) and Largactil (U.K.) The sucrose gap is introduced by Robert Stämpfli for the reliable measurement of action potential in nerve fibers.Stämpfli R. A new method for measuring membrane potentials with external electrodes Experientia 10 508–509 1954 10.1007/BF02166189 14353097 12 41384989 Swiss Contributions to the Neurosciences in Four Hundred Years: From the Renaissance to the Present K. Akert 978-3728123626 Verlag der Fachvereine Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zurich August 1996 Metrology 10th General Conference on Weights and Measures proposes the six original SI base units. Alexander Macmillan publishes the "Macmillan correction" to account for errors in the calculation of velocity of an object moving along a gradient due to viscous effects and wall proximity. Physics January 2 – Harold Hopkins and Narinder Singh Kapany at Imperial College London report achieving low-loss light transmission through a 75 cm long optical fiber bundle.H. H. Hopkins N. S. Kapany Nature 10.1038/173039b0 173 39 1954 A flexible fibrescope, using static scanning 4392 1954Natur.173...39H 4275331 March 1 – Castle Bravo: United States carries out a thermonuclear weapon test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. September 29 – CERN is founded by twelve European states.http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/About/History54-en.html 1954: foundations for European science CERN 2008 February 28, 2011 First tokamak built, in the Soviet Union.V. Reshetov http://www.vokrugsveta.ru/vs/article/429/ An ocean of energy https://web.archive.org/web/20131113224010/http://www.vokrugsveta.ru/vs/article/429/ 2013-11-13 2013-11-13 Russian Psychology Summer – Robbers Cave Experiment carried out by Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif.Sherif, M. Harvey, O. J. White, B. J. Hood, W. Sherif, C. W. Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment https://archive.org/details/intergroupconfli00univ registration 1961 University Book Exchange Norman, Oklahoma Man Meets Dog is published by Konrad Lorenz. Technology June 26 – Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, the first civilian nuclear power station, is commissioned in the Soviet Union.Nuclear Power in Russia World Nuclear Association http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf45.html 2011-12-16 December 2011 February 13, 2013 https://web.archive.org/web/20130213052522/http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf45.html dead June 29 – Buckminster Fuller is granted a United States patent for his development of the geodesic dome.U.S. patent 2,682,235. September 30 – The submarine Nautilus SSN-571, the first atomic-powered vessel, is commissioned by the United States Navy. October 18 – Texas Instruments announces development of the first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, manufactured in Indianapolis; it goes on sale the following month. December 16 – The first synthetic diamond is produced.Bundy F. P. Hall H. T. Strong H. M. Wentorf R. H. 1955 Man-made diamonds http://www.htracyhall.org/papers/19550028.pdf dead Nature 176 4471 51–55 1955Natur.176...51B 10.1038/176051a0 https://web.archive.org/web/20140108123004/http://www.htracyhall.org/papers/19550028.pdf 2014-01-08 4266566 New Zealand engineer Sir William Hamilton develops the first pump-jet engine (the "Hamilton Jet") capable of propelling a jetboat.Sir William Hamilton OBE http://www.hamiltonjet.co.nz/about_hamiltonjet/sir_william_hamilton HamiltonJet 2007 2012-11-12 The first electric drip brew coffeemaker is patented in Germany and named the Wigomat after its inventor Gottlob Widmann.Sixty years of the Federal Republic of Germany – a retrospective of everyday life http://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/lp/prj/mtg/typ/bun/en4922236.htminventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/coffee.htm 2002-12-28 February 25, 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20210225023359/https://www.goethe.de/ins/gb/en/index.html dead Staley T. McBrayer invents the Vanguard web offset press for newspaper printing in Fort Worth, Texas.https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-apr-18-me-staley18-story.html Staley McBrayer, 92; Inventor of Offset Press for Newspaper Printing 2002-04-18 2017-10-19 Los Angeles Times The angle grinder is invented by German company Ackermann + Schmitt (Flex-Elektrowerkzeuge). Awards Fields Prize in Mathematics: Kunihiko Kodaira and Jean-Pierre Serre, the latter being the youngest-ever winner, at age 27 Nobel Prizes Physics – Max Born and Walther Bothe Chemistry – Linus Pauling Medicine – John Franklin Enders, Thomas Huckle Weller and Frederick Chapman Robbins Births January 16 – Morten P. Meldal, Danish Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, 2022.Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 2022-10-05 The Nobel Prize https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2022/press-release/ 2022-10-06 February 9 – Kevin Warwick, English scientist, author of March of the Machines. March – Clare Marx, English surgeon. May 14 – Peter J. Ratcliffe, English cellular biologist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate, 2019. June 20 Ilan Ramon (died 2003), Israeli astronaut. Huda Zoghbi, Lebanese-born geneticist. July 11 – Julia King, English materials engineer. July 17 – Angela Kasner, German physical chemist and Chancellor. July 28 – Gerd Faltings, German mathematician. August 28 – George M. Church, American geneticist, molecular engineer and chemist. September 5 – Yu Myeong-Hee, South Korean microbiologist. November 1 – Graham Colditz, Australian-born epidemiologist. November 7 – Vijay Kumar, Indian molecular biologist. December 11 – Peter Hegemann, German biophysicist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate, 2026.Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-release/ 2026-10-05 NobelPrize.org en-US https://web.archive.org/web/20261005094452/https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-release/ 2026-10-05 live December 29 – Albrecht Böttcher, German mathematician. George McGavin, Scottish entomologist. Deaths January 17 – Leonard Eugene Dickson (born 1874), American mathematician. March 7 Otto Diels (born 1876), German Nobel Chemistry laureate, 1950. Ludwik Hirszfeld (born 1884), Polish microbiologist and serologist. April 10 – Auguste Lumière (born 1862), French inventor, film pioneer. April 21 – Emil Post (born 1897), American mathematician and logician. June 7 – Alan Turing (born 1912), English mathematician and computer scientist (probable suicide).Alan Turing Biography, Facts, & Education https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alan-Turing Encyclopædia Britannica 2020-02-14 July 11 – Henry Valentine Knaggs (born 1859), English practitioner of naturopathic medicine. October 3 – Vera Gaze (born 1899), Soviet Russian astronomer. October 8 – Dimitrie Pompeiu (born 1873), Romanian mathematician. November 29 – Enrico Fermi (born 1901), Italian American physicist. References 30em Category:20th century in science Category:1950s in science