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June 28-July 11

• Emil Richard Erlenmeyer born 1825: conical flask (Erlenmeyer flask); organic synthesis (including tyrosine and guanidine).
• Jenny Pickworth Glusker born 1931: crystallography; structural studies of carcinogenisis and mutagenisis
• Maria Goeppert-Mayer born 1906: nucleus shell structure; Nobel Prize (physics), 1963.
• Jane Haldimand Marcet died 1858 (birth date unknown in 1769): wrote Conversations on Chemistry (popular chemistry text).
• F. Sherwood Rowland born 1927: atmospheric chemistry, particularly of ozone layer; Nobel Prize, 1995.

• Peter Waage born 1833: formulated law of mass action (with brother-in-law Cato Guldberg)

• Paul Berg born 1926: recombinant DNA; Nobel Prize, 1980.
• Joseph Caventou born 1795: worked with Pierre-Joseph Pelletier; isolated strychnine, chlorophyll, quinine, and caffeine
• Humphry Davy announced the isolation of barium (Ba, element 56), calcium (Ca, 20), "magnium" (magnesium, Mg, 12), and strontium (Sr, 38) to the Royal Society, 1808. He also announced the isolation of boron (B, element 5), nine days after Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Thenard made a similar announcement in France. (Read Davy's paper.)
• William Higgins died 1825 (uncertain; birth date unknown in 1762 or 1763): atomic notions of chemical combination; advocate of antiphlogistic theory of combustion.
• Valence bond paper on H₂ by Walter Heitler and Fritz London received at Zeitschrift für Physik, 1927.

• Gerald Maurice Edelman born 1929: structure of antibodies; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1972.
• Gladys Anderson Emerson born 1903: isolation and function of vitamin E (tocopherol); vitamin B deficiencies.
• Alfred Goodman Gilman born 1941: G-proteins and cellular signal transduction; Nobel prize (medicine), 1994.
• Franz Joseph Müller von Reichenstein born 1740: discovered tellurium (Te, element 52).

• Richard Axel born 1946: research on olfaction, one of the "chemical senses;" Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2004.
• Elkan Rodgers Blout born 1919: protein conformation.
• William Henry Bragg born 1862: X-ray crystallography (Bragg's law); Nobel Prize (Physics), 1915 with son William Lawrence. Read reminiscences by the younger Bragg and a biography of the elder from Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald.
• Fritz Haber demonstrated nitrogen fixation process (Haber process for synthetic ammonia) to Badische Aniline und Soda-Fabrik (BASF), 1909.
• Albert Ladenburg born 1842: synthesis of pyridine, piperidine, and other compounds
• Jean'ne Marie Shreeve born 1933: synthetic fluorine chemistry, particularly fluorinated compounds of nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus; Garvan Medal, 1972.
• Fritz Ullmann born 1872: Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry.
• Paul Weisz born 1919: catalytic activity of artificial and natural zeolites.

• Antoine-Jerome Balard announced discovery of bromine (Br, element 35) to Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1826.
• Samuel Proctor Massie, Jr. born 1919: silicon chemistry; science education (encouraging disadvantaged students into science)
• Sergei Semenovich Nametkin born 1876: terpene chemistry; rearrangement of camphenes.

• Ernst Otto Beckmann born 1853: Beckmann rearrangement in organic chemistry; Beckmann thermometer .
• NASA Pathfinder landed on Mars, 1997. Unmanned mission included physical and chemical characterization of Martian surface.

• American Cyanamid (now part of BASF Agricultural Products) organized, 1907.
• Herbert Spencer Gasser born 1888: electrophysiology of nerves; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1944.
• John Howard Northrop born 1891: purification of enzymes; fermentation process for acetone manufacture; Nobel Prize, 1946.
• William Macquorn Rankine born 1820: thermodynamics of steam engines; absolute temperature scale (Rankine scale)
• Robert Williams of Merck, Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories announced synthesis of vitamin B₁, 1936.

• William Hobson Mills born 1873: tetrahedral ammonium ions; materials for photography in red light.
• Axel Hugo Theorell born 1903: structure of enzymes; crystallized myoglobin; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1955.

• Robert Goddard obtained a patent (US patent 1,102,653) for a liquid fuel rocket, 1914.
• Camillo Golgi born 1843: neuroscience, including the so-called "black reaction" for staining nerve cells; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1906. (Thanks to Ray Williams at ACS for pointing me toward this entry.)

• Jason Cardelli reported in Science interstellar abundances of the heaviest elements yet detected in interstellar gas (including thallium and lead), 1994.

• Ford Motor Company incorporated, 1919.

• Kurt Alder born 1902: Diels-Alder cycloaddition reaction, Nobel Prize, 1950 with Otto Diels.

• Samuel Abraham Goudsmit born 1902: electron spin.
• William Robert Grove born 1811: electrochemistry; fuel cells; conservation of energy (On The Correlation of Physical Forces)
• Theodore Harold Maiman born 1927: invented ruby laser (first operable optical laser, US patent 3,353,115; see original paper)

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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