1916 in science - Definition

The year 1916 in science and technology included many significant events, some of which are listed below.

Chemistry

• Gilbert Lewis and Irving Langmuir formulate an electron shell model of chemical bonding
• Sydney Chapman and David Enskog systematically develop a kinetic theory of gases
• Jan Czochralski invents a method for growing single crystals of metals.

Physics

• Albert Einstein shows that the field equations of general relativity admit wavelike solutions
• Karl Schwarzschild solves the Einstein vacuum field equations for uncharged spherically-symmetric non-rotating systems,

Births

• January 10 - Sune K. Bergström (d. 2004), Swedish biochemist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Medicine.
• March 4 - Hans Eysenck (d. 1997), psychologist.
• April 30 - Claude E. Shannon (d. 2001), mathematician.
• June 8 - Francis Crick (d. 2004), American Nobelaureate in Physiology for discovering the double helix structure for DNA.
• June 11 - Alexander Prochorow (d. 2002), cosmonaut.
• December 15 - Maurice Wilkins (d. 2004), Nobelaureate in Physiology for discovering the double helix structure for DNA using X-ray diffraction.

Deaths

• February 12 - Richard Dedekind (b. 1831), mathematician.
• February 19 - Ernst Mach (b. 1838), physicist.
• July 23 - Sir William Ramsay (b. 1852), chemist and Nobel prize winner
• November 13 - Percival Lowell (b. 1855), astronomer.
• November 24 - Hiram Maxim (b. 1840), inventor of the machine gun.