Portrait of John Scott Haldane

Birthday profile

John Scott Haldane

John Scott Haldane, Scottish physiologist, physician, and academic (died 1936)

Born
May 2, 1860
Died
March 15, 1936
Zodiac sign
Taurus
Birth year
1860

About John Scott Haldane

John Scott Haldane (; 2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936) was a Scottish physician physiologist and philosopher famous for his often-dangerous self-experimentation that led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He also experimented on his son, the celebrated and polymathic biologist J. B. S. Haldane, even when he was quite young. Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing potentially lethal cocktails of gases while recording their effect on his mind and body. Haldane visited the scenes of many mining disasters and investigated their causes. When the Germans used poison gas in World War I, Haldane went to the front at the request of Lord Kitchener and attempted to identify the gases being used. One outcome of this was his invention of a respirator, known as the black veil. Haldane's investigations into decompression sickness resulted in the concept of staged decompression, and the first reasonably reliable decompression tables, and his mathematical model is still used in highly modified forms for computing decompression schedules. John Scott Haldane (; 2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936) was a Scottish physician physiologist and philosopher famous for intrepid self-experimentation which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He identified carbon monoxide as the lethal constituent of afterdamp, the gas created by combustion, after examining many bodies of miners killed in pit explosions.

Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.

The world when John Scott Haldane was born

John Scott Haldane was born in 1860. The year snapshot below places that birthday in its cultural and historical setting: the music and films people were following, the headlines shaping public life, and the everyday prices families encountered.

Headlines and milestones

  • Top headlineAbraham Lincoln elected — South Carolina secedes
  • Technology milestonePony Express mail service begins
  • World population~1.4B

United States snapshot

  • U.S. leaderJames Buchanan
  • U.S. population31.4M

1860 versus 2026

These figures put everyday life in John Scott Haldane's birth year beside the site's latest United States snapshot.

Measure18602026
Population31.4M341 million

Sources and editorial standards

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