October Calendar of Famous Inventions and Birthdays

Celebrate October's Famous Inventions and Birthdays

On the October Calendar - October's Bright Blue Weather
LOC, Prints and Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection Albert M. Bender, artist

October marks the first full month of fall and the coming of the Halloween and holiday season, but it's the month when many famous inventors and scientists were born and a number of great inventions and brands were patented, trademarked, or copyrighted.

Whether you're curious about who shares the same October birthday as you or just want to know what happened on this day in history, check out some of the great things that happened in October.

Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights

Find out what famous events happened on the October calendar concerning the history of patents, trademarks, or copyrights—from the first episode of the "Twilight Zone" on October 1, 1959, to the patent for the ballpoint pen in 1888.

October 1

  • 1959 - The first episode of Rod Sterling's "Twilight Zone" was copyright registered.

October 2

October 3

  • 1950 - The transistor was patented by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain.

October 4

  • 1949 - The patent for an antibiotic for typhoid was granted to Crooks, Rebstock, Controalis, and Bartz.

October 5

  • 1961 - "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the movie based on Truman Capote's book, was copyright registered.

October 6

  • 1941 - Electric photography, now referred to as xerography or photocopying, was patented by Chester Carlson.

October 7

  • 1975 - Patent Number 3,909,854 was granted to Ysidro M. Martinez for a knee implant prosthesis.

October 8

  • 1901 - Domino Sugar was trademark registered.

October 9

  • 1855 - Isaac Singer patented his sewing machine. The first functional sewing machine was invented by Barthelemy Thimonnier in 1830, and he was almost killed by enraged French tailors because they felt threatened by his invention.

October 10

  • 1911 - Henry Ford received a patent for an automobile transmission mechanism.

October 11

  • 1841 - A patent for a collapsible tube for use with such items as toothpaste was granted to John Rand.

October 12

  • 1972 - Stevie Wonder copyright registered the words and music for "You Are the Sunshine of My Life"—Wonder registered his first work at age 14 in 1964.

October 13

  • 1893 - The melody for "Happy Birthday To You" was copyright registered. "Happy Birthday" was originally published as "Good Morning To All" in a book called "Song Stories for the Kindergarten" written by Mildred and Patty Hill.

October 14

October 15

October 16

  • 1900 - Frank Sprague was granted a patent for a multi-control for electric trains.

October 17

  • 1961 - "Hot Rocks" Candy was trademark registered.

October 18

October 19

  • 1953 - Ray Bradbury's novel, "Fahrenheit 451" was copyright registered. "Fahrenheit 451" was based on Bradbury's earlier short story called "The Fireman" and later made into a movie.

October 20

  • 1904 - The song "Yankee Doodle Boy" was copyright registered.

October 21

  • 1958 - Tater Tots were trademark registered.

October 22

  • 1940 - Julian, Mayer, and Krause received a patent for cortisone, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, adrenal insufficiency, allergies, diseases of connective tissue, and gout.

October 23

  • 1877 - A patent for a gas-motor engine was issued to Nicolaus Otto and Francis and William Crossley.

October 24

  • 1836 - Alonzo Phillips patented a friction match.
  • 1861 - The first transcontinental telegraph system was completed, making it possible to transmit messages rapidly (by mid-19th-century standards) from coast to coast.

October 25

  • 1960 - The musical play "Camelot" by Loewe and Lerner was copyright registered.

October 26

  • 1928 - The novel "Peter Pan" by James Barrie was copyright registered.

October 27

  • 1992 - Nintendo of America copyright registered the configuration of its hand-held game machine.

October 28

  • 1879 - William Lincoln was issued a patent for a lamp.

October 29

  • 1955 - Warner Brothers copyright registered the movie "A Rebel without a Cause" starring James Dean.

October 30

October 31

  • 1961 - Patent Number 3,003,667 was granted to Edward Aguado of St. Louis, MO, for an "airway for artificial respiration."
  • 2,000 B.C. - The pagans were known to celebrate the last night of their year on All Hallow's Eve, which later became known as Halloween and was adopted as a "trick or treat" holiday.

October Birthdays: Inventors, Scientists, and Artists

Many notable historical figures in the fields of science, arts, and inventions were born in the 10th month of the Gregorian calendar, so read on to find out who shares your October birthday.

October 1

  • 1870 - Pieter van Essen was a Dutch artillery officer and the inventor of grape-shot shells.
  • 1904 - Otto Frisch was a noted Austrian physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project as part of the team that built the atomic bomb.
  • 1916 - Hungarian Tibor Reich was a textile designer who designed a textile for Princess Elizabeth's wedding and was also awarded a Design Centre Award for his photographically based Flamingo printed textile in 1957 during the Award's inaugural year.
  • 1931 - Reginald Hall was a noted endocrinologist who established internationally acclaimed endocrine units in Newcastle and Cardiff, with special expertise in diseases of the thyroid and pituitary glands.

October 2

  • 1832 - Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist credited with sparking interest in anthropological science in England as a result of his research on primitive people’s mentality, in particular, animism.
  • 1832 - Julius von Sachs was a German botanist who researched nutrition, tropism, and transpiration of water in plant physiology.
  • 1852 - William Ramsay was a British chemist who discovered neon gas.
  • 1891 - Henry Van Arsdale Porter invented the fan-shaped backboard used in basketball.
  • 1907 - Alexander Robertus was a British biochemist who researched the structure and synthesis of nucleotides, nucleosides, and nucleotide coenzymes, and won the 1957 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
  • 1907 - Lord Todd was a Scottish biochemist whose investigations of the building blocks of heredity earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1957.
  • 1914 - Jack Parsons was an American rocket scientist.

October 3

  • 1803 - John Gorrie invented a cold-air process of refrigeration.
  • 1844 - Patrick Manson is considered the "father of tropical medicine."
  • 1854 - William Crawford Gorgas served as the American Surgeon-General and helped cure yellow fever.
  • 1904 - Charles Pedersen was a noted British biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1987.

October 4

  • 1832 - William Griggs invented photo-chromo lithography.

October 5

  • 1713 - Denis Diderot was a French encyclopedist who wrote the "Dictionnaire Encyclopedique."
  • 1864 - Louis Lumiere made the first motion picture in 1895, invented camera equipment for making movies, and created a projector for viewing movies.
  • 1882 - Giorgio Abetti was a noted Italian astronomer who researched and wrote about solar physics.

October 6

  • 1824 - Henry Chadwick was a baseball pioneer who developed the first rule book for baseball.
  • 1846 - George Westinghouse was the inventor and businessman responsible for a commercial alternating current system.
  • 1866 - Reginald Fessenden was an inventor who broadcast the first program of voice and music.
  • 1918 - Abraham Robinson was a noted German mathematician most widely known for the development of non-standard analysis.
  • 1940 - John Warnock is a noted American computer scientist best known as the co-founder with Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems Inc.

October 7

  • 1903 - Louis S. B. Leakey was a famous archaeologist and anthropologist who convinced other scientists that Africa was the most significant area to search for evidence of human origins.
  • 1927 - R. D. Laing was a famous Scottish psychologist who wrote extensively on mental illness and the experience of psychosis.

October 8

  • 1869 - Frank Duryea was an inventor who made the first auto built and operated in the U.S.
  • 1917 - Rodney Robert Porter was an English biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for determining the exact chemical structure of an antibody.

October 9

  • 1873 - Karl Schwarzschild was a German physicist and astronomer who is best known for providing the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity known as the Schwarzschild solution.

October 10

  • 1757 - Erik Acharius was a Swedish botanist called "The father of lichenology."

October 11

  • 1758 - Wilhelm Olbers discovered the asteroids Pallas and Vesta.
  • 1821 - George Williams was the Englishman who founded the YMCA.
  • 1844 - Henry John Heinz founded the prepared-foods company Heinz 57 Varieties.
  • 1884 - Friedrich C. R. Bergius was a German chemist who derived benzine from brown coal and won the Nobel Prize.

October 12

  • 1860 - Elmer Sperry was the inventor of the gyrocompass.
  • 1875 - Aleister Crowley was a British occultist who founded the religion of Thelema.
  • 1923 - Jean Nidetch was the American nutritionist who invented Weight Watchers.

October 13

  • 1769 - Horace H. Hayden was considered the architect of the American system of dental education and the organizer of professional dentistry, who also co-founded the first dental college.
  • 1821 - Rudolf Virchow was a German scientist who is referred to as the "Father of Pathology" and the founder of the field of Social Medicine.
  • 1863 - Auguste Rateau was a French mining engineer who invented the Rateau steam turbine.

October 14

  • 1857 - Elwood Haynes was an auto pioneer who built one of the earliest American automobiles.
  • 1900 - W. Edwards Deming was a noted American scientist.
  • 1939 - Ralph Lauren was the fashion designer who reinvented chaps.
  • 1954 - Mordechai Vanunu was a noted Israeli scientist.

October 15

  • 1924 - Lee A. Iacocca is a CEO of Chrysler Corp
  • 1937 - Anthony Hopkins was a clinical neurologist who served as the Director of the Research Unit at the Royal College of Physicians since 1988 (until his death in 1997).

October 16

  • 1708 - Albrecht von Haller was a Swiss scientist who focused on experimental physiology at the Academy of Science.
  • 1925 - Lorraine Sweeney was a communications specialist
  • 1930 - John Polkinghorne was a British Physicist who was a prominent voice in explaining the relationship between religion and science.
  • 1979 - Matt Nagle was born in Massachusetts as a quadriplegic and became the first to use a brain-computer interface to control movement.

October 17

  • 1563 - Jodocus Hondius was a Flemish mathematician and cartographer.
  • 1806 - Alphonse L.P.P. de Candolle was a Swiss botanist who wrote "Géographie botanique raisonnée" to compile large amounts of data from the scientific expeditions taking place at the time.
  • 1947 - Charles A. Ingene was a macro-marketing researcher who wrote "Mathematical Models of Distribution Channels."

October 18

  • 1854 - Solomon A. Andree was a Swedish engineer, balloonist, and Arctic explorer.
  • 1859 - Henri Bergson was a French philosopher who studied creative evolution and won the Nobel Prize in 1927.
  • 1947 - Luc Journet was a Belgian physician who wrote the "Order of Zonnetempel."

October 19

  • 1859 - Georg Knorr was a German engineer who created brake system trains.
  • 1895 - Lewis Mumford was an American Sociologist who studied urban cities and architecture.
  • 1910 - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his work on the structural evolution of stars.

October 20

  • 1812 - Austin Flint was a 19th-century heart research pioneer.
  • 1859 - John Dewey was a philosopher, educational theorist, and writer who emphasized "learn by doing" in education.
  • 1891 - James Chadwick was the English physicist who discovered the neutron.
  • 1924 - Kenneth William Gatland was an aerospace scientist who became an expert on spaceflight.

October 21

  • 1833 - Alfred Nobel was the Swedish scientist who invented the detonator for dynamite and nitroglycerin, after whom the Nobel Prize was named.
  • 1839 - Georg von Siemens founded the Deutsche Bank.

October 22

  • 1896 - Charles Glenn King was the biochemist who discovered vitamin C
  • 1903 - George Beadle was the American biologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1958 for discovering the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells.
  • 1905 - Karl Jansky was a Czechoslovakian who was the first person to discover cosmic radio emissions in 1932.

October 23

  • 1942 - Anita Roddick is the English cosmetic manufacturer who founded the Body Shop.

October 24

  • 1632 - Antony van Leeuwenhoek was considered the father of microscopy because of the advances he made in microscope design and use.
  • 1953 - Steven Hatfill was an American scientist and a former researcher of biodefense for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases who was accused (wrongfully) of starting the 2004 anthrax attacks.
  • 1908 - John Alwyne Kitching was a British zoologist and famed lecturer on biology at a number of Ivy League schools.

October 25

  • 1790 - Robert Stirling was the Scottish inventor responsible for creating the Sterling engine.
  • 1811 - Evariste Galois was a French mathematician who wrote "The Theory of G."
  • 1877 - Henry Norris Russell was an astronomy who discovered the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
  • 1929 - Roger John Tayler was a British astrophysicist who wrote a number of textbooks about stellar structure and evolution, plasma stability, nucleogenesis, and cosmology.
  • 1945 - David Norman Schramm was an American astrophysicist who was once the leading expert on the Big Bang theory.

October 26

  • 1855 - Charles Post invented the breakfast cereal Post Cereals.
  • 1917 - Felix the Cat was a famous cartoon cat who first made his debut on this date.

October 27

  • 1811 - Issac Singer created the home sewing machine company Singer, used by everyone from professional designers to stay-at-home moms.
  • 1872 - Emily Post was an authority on etiquette.
  • 1917 - Oliver Tambo was the co-founder of the African National Congress.

October 28

  • 1793 - Eliphalet Remington was the American gunmaker who invented the Remington rifle.
  • 1855 - Ivan V. Mitshurin was a Russian botanist who identified many new types of fruit.
  • 1893 - Christopher K. Ingold was an English chemist who developed the idea of reaction mechanisms and the electronic structure of organic compounds.
  • 1914 - Jonas Salk was the American medical researcher who invented the polio vaccine.
  • 1914 - Richard Lawrence Millington Synge was a British biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1952.
  • 1967 - John Romero is an American computer scientist who pioneered First Person Shooters (FPSs) like "Doom" and "Quake" in the 1980s.

October 29

  • 1656 - Edmond Halley was an English scientist who computer the orbit for Halley's Comet, which is where it got its name.

October 30

  • 1880 - Abram F. Ioffe was a Russian physicist who established research laboratories for radioactivity, superconductivity, and nuclear physics.
  • 1928 - Daniel Nathans was an American scientist who won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction enzymes.

October 31

  • 1755 - Jean Louis van Aelbroeck was a Flemish agronomist whose work led to dispensing with an extended fallow period between crops.
  • 1815 - Karl Weierstrass was a Germany mathematician who wrote the theory of functions.
  • 1835 - J. F. W. Adolf Ritter von Baeyer was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1905.
  • 1847 - Galileo Ferraris was an Italian physicist who invented AC power and the induction motor.
  • 1898 - Alfred Sauvy was a French statistician who wrote "Affluence and Population."
  • 1935 - Ronald Graham is an American mathematician who pioneered the field of discrete mathematics.
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Bellis, Mary. "October Calendar of Famous Inventions and Birthdays." ThoughtCo, Sep. 1, 2021, thoughtco.com/today-in-history-october-calendar-1992499. Bellis, Mary. (2021, September 1). October Calendar of Famous Inventions and Birthdays. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/today-in-history-october-calendar-1992499 Bellis, Mary. "October Calendar of Famous Inventions and Birthdays." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/today-in-history-october-calendar-1992499 (accessed March 28, 2024).