December 24
1473: Priest, philosopher, physicist, and theologian John Cantius dies. He helped develop Jean Buridan's theory of impetus, anticipating the work of Galileo and Newton.
1761: Astronomer Jean-Louis Pons born. He will become the greatest visual comet discoverer of all time: between 1801 and 1827, Pons will discover thirty-seven comets, more than any other person in history.
1818: Physicist and brewer James Prescott Joule born. He will study the nature of heat, and discover its relationship to mechanical work.
1822: Mathematician Charles Hermite born. He will do research on number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra.
1877: Thomas Edison files for a patent on the phonograph. The idea came to him while working on a telegraph transmitter, when he noticed that when the tape of the machine was played at high speed, it gave off a noise resembling spoken words. After experimenting with a needle attached to the diaphragm of a telephone receiver to prick paper tape to record a message, his idea evolved to using a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder.
1882: Mathematician Johann Benedict Listing dies. He introduced the term "topology" in a famous article published in 1847, having already used the term in correspondence some years earlier.
1905: Businessman, investor, aviator, film director, and philanthropist Howard Hughes born. He will be known during his lifetime as one of the most financially successful individuals in the world.
1906: Inventor Reginald Fessenden transmits the first radio broadcast; consisting of a poetry reading, a violin solo, and a speech.
1917: Politician Ivan Goremykin dies. He is remembered for his Extreme Moustaches.
1962: Mathematician Wilhelm Ackermann dies. He discovered the Ackermann function, an important example in the theory of computation.