1913 in science

The year 1913 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

February 9 – Meteor procession of February 9, 1913 visible along a great circle arc 6, across the Americas. Astronomer Clarence Chant concludes that the source was a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.
Berlin Observatory moves to Babelsberg.

February – Daniel J. O'Conor and Herbert A. Faber file for a United States patent on the composite plastic laminate Formica.
Elmer McCollum and Marguerite Davis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Lafayette Mendel and Thomas Burr Osborne at Yale University independently discover Vitamin A.
Protactinium is first identified by Oswald Helmuth Göhring and Kasimir Fajans.
Henry Moseley shows that nuclear charge is the real basis for numbering the elements and discovers a systematic relation between wavelength and atomic number by using x-ray spectra obtained by diffraction in crystals. Frederick Soddy proposes that isotopes may have differing atomic weights while he and Fajams independently propose the radioactive displacement law of Fajans and Soddy.
J. J. Thomson shows that charged subatomic particles can be separated by their mass-to-charge ratio, the technique known as mass spectrometry.
The Bergius process is first developed and patented by German chemist Friedrich Bergius.

March – First publication of Isis, the journal of the history of science edited by George Sarton, in Ghent.
Pierre Duhem begins publication of Le Système du Monde: Histoire des Doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic in Paris.

March 6 – First publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics, a polemical review of Peter Coffey's The Science of Logic written in 1912 when Wittgenstein was an undergraduate studying with Bertrand Russell.
Publication of the 3rd volume of Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, one of the most important and seminal works in mathematical logic and philosophy.
Émile Borel first states the infinite monkey theorem in the way it will subsequently become known.

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg work out the Bragg condition for strong X-ray reflection.
Niels Bohr presents his quantum model of the atom.
William Crookes creates sunglass lenses.
Robert Millikan measures the fundamental unit of electric charge.
Georges Sagnac demonstrates the Sagnac effect, showing that light propagates at a speed independent of the speed of its source.
Johannes Stark demonstrates that strong electric fields will split the Balmer spectral line series of hydrogen.

John B. Watson publishes the article — sometimes called "The Behaviorist Manifesto".

April 29 – Swedish American engineer Gideon Sundback of Hoboken, New Jersey, patents the all-purpose zipper.
May 26 – Igor Sikorsky flies the world's first 4-engine fixed-wing aircraft, his Bolshoi Baltisky biplane, near Saint Petersburg.
August – Invention of stainless steel by Harry Brearley in Sheffield, England.
Oskar Barnack of Leitz produces the first 35 mm film miniature still camera.
The Kaplan turbine is invented by Viktor Kaplan.
French inventor René Lorin patents the ramjet, but attempts to build a prototype fail due to inadequate materials.

Die Naturwissenschaften first published by Die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.Journal of Ecology first published.

January 31 – Murray Bowen, American psychiatrist and pioneer of family therapy.
February 28 – David Hawkins, American philosopher of science and mathematics and science educator.
March 2 – Georgy Flyorov, Russian physicist who is known for his discovery of the spontaneous fission.
March 26 – Paul Erdős, Hungarian mathematician.
April 20 – Willi Hennig, German entomologist and pioneer of cladistics.
April 30 – Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein, American mathematician and cryptanalyst.
May 13 – Erich Lackner, Austrian-born German civil engineer.
June 10 – Edward Abraham, English biochemist.
August 20 – Roger Wolcott Sperry, American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate.
August 22 – Bruno Pontecorvo, Italian-born physicist.
October 10 – Remy Chauvin, French biologist and entomologist.
November 12 – Joel Elkes, Königsberg-born pharmacologist.

January 2 – Léon Teisserenc de Bort, French meteorologist.
January 4 – Benjamin Leigh Smith, English Arctic explorer.
January 18 – George Alexander Gibson, Scottish physician and geologist.
February 20 – Robert von Lieben, Austrian physicist.
April 14 – Carl Hagenbeck, German zoologist.
April 26 – Sigismond Jaccoud, Swiss-born French physician.
May 28 – John Lubbock, English naturalist and archaeologist.
August 3 – Josephine Cochrane, American inventor of the first commercially successful dishwasher.
September 29 – Rudolf Diesel, German mechanical engineer.
November 7 – Alfred Russel Wallace, British biologist.