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The year 1933 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

  • April – American radio engineer Karl Jansky of Bell Labs announces his discovery of a source of radio waves at the centre of Sagittarius (constellation), opening the field of radio astronomy.
  • October 13 – The British Interplanetary Society is founded.
  • Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky invent the concept of the neutron star, a new type of celestial object, suggesting that supernovae might be created by the collapse of a normal star to form a neutron star.
  • Sir Arthur Eddington publishes The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900–1931 in Cambridge.
  • Comedian Will Hay observes the periodic Great White Spot on Saturn from his private observatory in London.
  • Fritz Zwicky postulates the existence of dark matter.

Chemistry

  • Gilbert N. Lewis isolates the first sample of pure heavy water by electrolysis.
  • Morris S. Kharasch and Frank R. Mayo propose that free radicals are responsible for anti-Markovnikov addition of hydrogen bromide to allyl bromide.

Earth sciences

  • March 10 – Long Beach earthquake in Southern California: First recording of earthquake strong ground motions by an accelerograph network, installed in 1932 by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

Mathematics

  • Andrey Kolmogorov publishes Foundations of the Theory of Probability, laying the modern axiomatic foundations of probability theory.
  • David Champernowne, while still a Cambridge undergraduate, publishes his work on the Champernowne constant in real numbers.
  • Alfréd Haar introduces Haar measure.
  • Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson publish the Neyman–Pearson lemma.
  • Stanley Skewes discovers Skewes' number.

Pharmacology

  • Late – Amphetamine is first presented as a pharmaceutical product when Smith, Kline and French in the United States begin selling it as an inhaler under the brand name Benzedrine as a decongestant.

Physics

  • September 12 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury (London), conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
  • November 28 – Robert J. Van de Graaff conducts the first public demonstration of the Round Hill generator

Physiology and medicine

  • April 3 – First attempted human kidney transplant, by Dr Yuri Voronoy in the Soviet city of Kherson; the recipient dies 2 days later due to incompatibility of blood type with the (cadaveric) donor.
  • July 8 – English researchers Wilson Smith, Christopher Andrewes and Patrick Laidlaw report isolating a human influenza A virus and its transferability to ferrets.
  • July 14 – Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring enacted in Nazi Germany allowing compulsory sterilization of citizens suffering from a list of alleged genetic disorders.
  • Manfred Sakel begins to practice insulin shock therapy on psychiatric patients in Vienna.

Technology

  • March 7 – The hydraulic torque converter is patented by Alf Lysholm.
  • June – A research group at RCA headed by Vladimir K. Zworykin publicly launches the iconoscope, the first practical cathode-ray tube television camera.
  • June 26 – American Totalisator unveils its first tote board, the electronic pari-mutuel betting machine, at the Arlington Park race track near Chicago.

Organizations

  • Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) first opens to the public, as part of the Century of Progress Exposition.
  • The Institute for Advanced Study opens at Princeton, New Jersey, attracting Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel.
  • Sheffield Trades Historical Society (later South Yorkshire Industrial History Society) established in England.

Awards

  • Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac
  • Chemistry – not awarded
  • Physiology or Medicine – Thomas Hunt Morgan

Births

  • January 6 – Oleg Makarov (died 2003), Soviet cosmonaut.
  • January 18 – David Bellamy (died 2019), English botanist.
  • March 9 – Sir David Weatherall (died 2018), English molecular geneticist.
  • March 10 – Patricia Bergquist (died 2009), New Zealand scientist specializing in anatomy and taxonomy.
  • March 23 – Philip Zimbardo, American social psychologist.
  • April 1 – Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, French physicist and Nobel laureate
  • April 14 – Yuri Oganessian, Russian nuclear physicist.
  • April 26 – Arno Allan Penzias (died 2024), German-born American physicist and radio astronomer.
  • May 22 – Chen Jingrun (died 1996), Chinese mathematician.
  • July 9 – Oliver Sacks (died 2015), English-born neurologist.
  • July 12 – Max Birnstiel (died 2014), Swiss molecular biologist.
  • July 15 – John Hopfield, American neuroscientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
  • August 10 – Ed Posner (died 1993), American mathematician.
  • August 15
  • Stanley Milgram (died 1984), American social psychologist.
  • Michael Rutter (died 2021) English child psychiatrist.
  • September 6 – Juliet Clutton-Brock (died 2015), English zooarchaeologist.
  • September 10 – Yevgeny Khrunov (died 2000), Soviet cosmonaut.
  • September 26 – Charles C. Conley (died 1984), American mathematician specializing in dynamical systems.
  • October 2 – Sir John Gurdon (died 2025), English developmental biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  • October 9 – Sir Peter Mansfield (died 2017), English physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  • November 1 – Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri, Bengali-born mathematician.
  • November 4 – Sir Charles K. Kao (died 2018), Chinese electrical engineer and physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
  • November 14 – Akira Endo (died 2024), Japanese biochemist.
  • December 22 – Thomas Stockham (died 2004), American electrical engineer and inventor
  • December 23 – Akihito, ichthyologist and Emperor of Japan.

Deaths

  • January 14 – Sir Robert Jones, 1st Baronet (born 1857), Welsh orthopaedic surgeon.
  • May 22 – Sándor Ferenczi (born 1873), Hungarian psychoanalyst.
  • June 14 – Ernest William Moir (born 1862), British civil engineer.
  • September 25 – Paul Ehrenfest (born 1880), Austrian physicist and mathematician.
  • October 29
  • Albert Calmette (born 1863), French physician, bacteriologist and immunologist.
  • Paul Painlevé (born 1863), mathematician and statesman, 62nd Prime Minister of France.
  • November 3 – Pierre Paul Émile Roux (born 1853), French physician, bacteriologist and immunologist.
  • December 8 – John Joly (born 1857), Irish physicist.

References