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May 3-17

• Wilbur Olin Atwater born 1844: food chemistry; co-inventor of Atwater-Rosa-Benedict respiration calorimeter.
• Samuel Glasstone born 1897: physical and nuclear chemistry; The Effects of Nuclear Weapons; A Treatise on Physical Chemistry.
• Marcel Golay born 1902: electronics and computers in analytical instrumentation, especially chromatography.
• Herman Mark born 1895: polymer chemistry; process for production of styrene from ethylbenzene.
• George Paget Thomson born 1892: electron diffraction; Nobel Prize (physics), 1937. It has been noted that G. P. Thomson helped show that the electron is a wave while his father, J. J. Thomson, helped show that it is a particle.

• Agnes Fay Morgan born 1884: nutrition, particularly vitamin content of prepared foods; Garvan Medal, 1949
• Louis-Jacques Thenard born 1777: discovered sodium peroxide, potassium peroxide, and hydrogen peroxide; Thenard's blue (used in coloring porcelain); showed that caustic soda and potash contain hydrogen and oxygen; research on chlorine and alkali metals.
• Sigurd Varian born 1901: with brother Russell, invented klystron tube and founded Varian instruments (now Varian, Inc.).

• John William Draper born 1811: first president of American Chemical Society; photographic pioneer; improved on Daguerre's process.
• Albert Ghiorso announced the discovery of nobelium (No, element 102) by (left to right) Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, John R. Walton and (absent) Glenn Seaborg at University of California, Berkeley, 1958.
• Proctor and Gamble incorporated, 1905.
• Arthur Leonard Schawlow born 1921: lasers and non-linear optical spectroscopy; Nobel prize (physics), 1981.

• Henry Edward Armstrong born 1848: chemistry of aromatic compounds (including dyestuffs); solutions (opposed to Arrhenius' and Ostwald's dissociation theories).
• Johann Joachim Becher born 1635: phlogiston theory.
• Julius Berend Cohen born 1859: laws of aromatic substitution; optical activity.
• Victor Grignard born 1871: developed magnesium-based reagent (Grignard reagent) used in organic synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1912.
• Paul Christian Lauterbur born 1926: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to medical imaging; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2003.
• Richard Moore born 1871: advocated helium for balloons and dirigibles; supervised production of radium salts in US.
• Jean Senebier born 1742: showed that green plants convert "fixed air" (carbon dioxide) to "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen)--the process now known as photosynthesis.

• Sidney Altman born 1939: proved that ribonucleic acid (RNA) can act as a catalyst in the cell; Nobel Prize, 1989.
• Arda Alden Green born 1899: isolation of phosphorylase, serotonin; bioluminescence (luciferase, luciferin); Garvan Medal, 1958
• Edwin Land born 1909: invented a light polarizing material (Polaroid) and an instant-developing photographic system (Polaroid Land camera, using US patent 2,543,181); founded Polaroid company.

• Bohuslav Brauner born 1855: chemistry of tellurium and the rare earths; predicted the existence of promethium (Pm, element 61).
• H. Robert Horvitz born 1947: genetics of organ development and cell death; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2002.
• Antoine Lavoisier was sentenced to death by the French Revolutionary Tribunal and executed by guillotine, 1794.
• Nevil Vincent Sidgwick born 1873: molecular structure and theory of valency.

• Manfred Eigen born 1927: chemical kinetics by relaxation techniques; Nobel Prize, 1967.
• Henry Gilman born 1893: organometallic chemistry.
• James Colquhoun Irvine born 1877: sugar chemistry.
• Edward Weston born 1850: improved nickel plating and electrical instruments.

• Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff announced the discovery of cesium (Cs, element 55), 1860.
• Edward Frankland provides a clear statement of the concept later known as chemical valence (in a paper on organometallic compounds), 1852.
• Gaspard Monge born 1746: liquefaction of sulfur dioxide; metric system; best known as a mathematician for work on differential geometry.
• François-Marie Raoult born 1830: properties of solutions; discovered that vapor pressure in many solutions is proportional to the number of molecules per unit volume in the solution (Raoult's law); freezing-point depression; vapor pressure lowering.
• Rudolf Schoenheimer born 1898: biochemist: cholesterol and heart disease; isotopic tagging of biochemical molecules.

• Koji Nakanishi born 1925: structural determination of natural products.
• Donald Othmer born 1904: chemical engineer; co-founder and editor of Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology.

• William Francis Giauque born 1895: thermodynamics, particularly at very low temperatures; Nobel Prize, 1949.
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin born 1910: X-ray determination of Vitamin B₁₂ crystal structure; Nobel Prize, 1964.
• Justus Liebig born 1803: "Father of agricultural chemistry"; quantitative organic analysis; Liebig condenser; distinguished fats, protins, and carbohydrates in foods. (View Liebig's monographs Familiar Letters on Chemistry, Animal Chemistry, and Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology.)
• First successful use of streptomycin on human beings, 1945.

• Marie Curie was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne, 1906 (the first woman professor there).
• Friedrich Karl Johannes Thiele born 1865: organic chemistry; unsaturated and nitrogenous compounds (particularly derivatives of hydrazine and guanidine).

• George Fownes born 1815: organic and analytical chemistry; author of Elementary Chemistry: Theoretical and Practical, which went through many editions long after Fownes' death.
• Edward Jenner inoculated a boy with cowpox virus (smallpox vaccine), 1796.
• Miguel Ondetti born 1930: synthesis and application of polypeptides to pharmaceuticals.

• Pierre Curie born 1859: piezoelectricity; magnetism (Curie temperature); codiscoverer with wife Marie of polonium (Po, element 84) and radium (Ra, 88); Nobel Prize (Physics), 1903 with Marie.
• William Hume-Rothery born 1899: metallurgy: alloys and intermetallic compounds.

• Adolf Ossian Aschan born 1860: alicyclic organic compounds; isoprene polymerization.
• Johannes Georg Bednorz born 1950: high-temperature superconducting materials; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1987.
• Theodore Harold Maiman first produced laser light (ruby laser, US patent 3,353,115), 1960.
• Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin born 1763: discovered chromium (Cr, element 24) and beryllium (Be, 4).

• Odd Hassel born 1897: conformational analysis; Nobel Prize, 1969
• Joseph Norman Lockyer born 1836: codiscovered helium (He, element 2) in the sun; founder and editor of the journal Nature.

Dates are given according to the Gregorian calendar to the extent I could find them. (Note: this applies particularly to 19^th-century Russians.)

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