Also on This Day in History April 27
Discover what happened on April 27 with HISTORY's summaries of major events, anniversaries,
famous births and notable deaths.
Births on This Day, April 27
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1896
Wallace Hume Carothers
American chemist who developed nylon (1935), the first synthetic polymer fibre to be spun from a melt.
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1846
Charles Joseph Van Depoele
Belgian-American inventor who was a pioneer in railway, electric lighting, and mining work, with more than 100 patents on electrical inventions.
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1875
Maurice de Broglie
(6th duke) (Louis-César-Victor-) Maurice de Broglie was a French physicist who made many contributions to the study of X rays.
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1913
Philip Abelson
American physical chemist who proposed the gas diffusion process for separating uranium-235 from uranium-238 which was essential to the development of the atomic bomb.
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1942
Valeri Vladimirovich Polyakov
Russian cosmonaut and doctor who established the record for the longest continuous stay in space of 438 days (8 Jan 1994 - 22 Mar 1995) aboard Russia's Mir Space Station.
Deaths on This Day, April 27
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1936
Karl Pearson
English mathematician who was one of the founders of modern statistics.
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2004
Roy Walford
American pathologist and gerontologist who pioneered, and wrote books on, the idea of restricting food intake to extend life span.
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1999
Mark David Weiser
American computer scientist and visionary who was the chief technology officer at XEROX PARC, and is remembered for developed the pioneering idea for what he referred to as “ubiquitous computing.”
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1932
Max Rubner
German physiologist who showed the available energy content of food was the same whether the material was consumed organically or merely burned (1894).
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2002
Ruth Handler
American inventor who created the Barbie Doll (1959), a teenage doll with a tiny waist and slender hips, and Ken, a boy doll (1961), which she named after her children.