Also on This Day in History September 18
Discover what happened on September 18 with HISTORY's summaries of major events, anniversaries,
famous births and notable deaths.
Births on This Day, September 18
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1907
Edwin McMillan
Edwin Mattison McMillan was an American nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1951 (with Glenn T. Seaborg) for his discovery of element 93.
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1854
Richard Tetley Glazebrook
English physicist who was the first director of the UK National Physical Laboratory, from 1 Jan 1900 until his retirement in Sep 1919.
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1831
Siegfried Marcus
German-Austrian inventor who built four of the world's earliest gasoline-powered automobiles.
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1819
Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault
French physicist whose Foucault Pendulum experimentally proved that the Earth rotates on its axis (6 Jan 1851).
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1752
Adrien-Marie Legendre
French mathematician who contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions.
Deaths on This Day, September 18
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1896
Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau
French physicist who was the first to measure the speed of light successfully without using astronomical calculations (1849).
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1967
John Cockcroft
Sir John Douglas Cockcroft was a British physicist, who shared (with Ernest T.S. Walton of Ireland) the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for pioneering the use of particle accelerators to study the atomic nucleus.
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1860
Joseph Locke
English civil engineer who build many significant early main-line railways.
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1891
William Ferrel
American meteorologist who was an important contributor to the understanding of oceanic and atmospheric circulation.
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2009
Mahlon Bush Hoagland
American biochemist who helped discover transfer RNA.