1954 in science

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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.^[1]
• Daniel I. Arnon demonstrates in the laboratory the chemical function of photosynthesis in chloroplasts.^[2][3]
• Eduard Paul Tratz and Heinz Heck propose the species name bonobo for what was previously known as the pygmy chimpanzee.^[4]

Chemistry

• 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.^[5][6]

Computer science

• 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.^[7]

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

• 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.
• 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.^[8]
• 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.^[9][10]

Metrology

• 10th General Conference on Weights and Measures proposes the six original SI base units.

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.^[11]
• March 1 – United States carries out a hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
• September 29 – CERN is founded by twelve European states.^[12]

Psychology

• 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.^[13]
• June 29 – Buckminster Fuller is granted a United States patent for his development of the geodesic dome.^[14]
• September 30 – The submarine USS 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.
• New Zealand engineer Sir William Hamilton develops the first pump-jet engine (the "Hamilton Jet") capable of propelling a jetboat.^[15]
• The first electric drip brew coffeemaker is patented in Germany and named the Wigomat after its inventor Gottlob Widmann.^[16]

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

• February 9 – Kevin Warwick, English scientist, author of March of the Machines.
• June 20 – Ilan Ramon (died 2003), Israeli astronaut.
• July 17 – Angela Kasner, German physical chemist and Chancellor.
• August 28 – George M. Church, American geneticist, molecular engineer and chemist.
• September 5 – Myeong-Hee Yu, South Korean microbiologist.

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 February 11, 1897), American mathematician and logician.
• June 7 – Alan Turing (born 1912), English mathematician and computer scientist (probable suicide).
• July 11 – Henry Valentine Knaggs (born 1859), English practitioner of naturopathic medicine.
• October 3 – Vera Fedorovna Gaze (born 1899), Soviet Russian astronomer.
• November 29 – Enrico Fermi (born 1901), Italian American physicist.

References

1. Dement'yev and Rustamov (1985). The Red Data Book of Turkmenistan. Ashgabat: Turkmenistan Publishing House.
2. Arnon, Daniel I.; Allen, Mary B.; Whatley, F. R. (1954). "Photosynthesis by Isolated Chloroplasts" (PDF). Nature. 174 (4426): 394–6. Bibcode:1954Natur.174..394A. doi:10.1038/174394a0.
3. Laurence, William L. (December 30, 1954). "Sun is Harnessed to Create Food: Science Team on the Coast Duplicates Photosynthesis Outside Plants' Cells". The New York Times. Retrieved July 18, 2010.
4. de Waal, Frans B. M., ed. (2002). Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. p. 51. ISBN 0-674-00460-4.
5. Brink, Clara; Hodgkin, Dorothy Crowfoot; Lindsey, June; Pickworth, Jenny; Robertson, John H.; White, John G. (December 25, 1954). "X-ray Crystallographic Evidence on the Structure of Vitamin B₁₂" (PDF). Nature. 174 (4443): 1169–117. Bibcode:1954Natur.174.1169B. doi:10.1038/1741169a0. PMID 13223773. Retrieved January 13, 2012.
6. Glusker, Jenny P. (1994). "Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994)" (PDF). Protein Science. 3: 2465–2469. doi:10.1002/pro.5560031233. PMC 2142778. PMID 7757003. Retrieved January 13, 2012.
7. "Benstonite". Mindat. Retrieved 2012-12-31.
8. "Donor Of First Successful Organ Transplant Dies 56 Years Later". The Huffington Post. December 29, 2010. Retrieved March 15, 2011.
9. Stämpfli, R. (1954). "A new method for measuring membrane potentials with external electrodes". Experientia. 10 (12): 508–509. doi:10.1007/BF02166189. PMID 14353097.
10. Akert, K. (August 1996). Swiss Contributions to the Neurosciences in Four Hundred Years: From the Renaissance to the Present. Verlag der Fachvereine Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zurich. ISBN 978-3728123626.
11. Hopkins, H. H.; Kapany, N. S. (1954). "A flexible fibrescope, using static scanning". Nature. 173 (4392): 39. Bibcode:1954Natur.173...39H. doi:10.1038/173039b0.
12. "1954: foundations for European science". CERN. 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2011.
13. "Nuclear Power in Russia". World Nuclear Association. December 2011. Retrieved 2011-12-16.
14. U.S. patent 2,682,235
15. "Sir William Hamilton OBE". HamiltonJet. 2007. Retrieved 2012-11-12.
16. "Sixty years of the Federal Republic of Germany – a retrospective of everyday life". Retrieved 2002-12-28.