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November 16-29

• Joel Hildebrand born 1881: liquids and solutions; introduced helium (He, element 2) into deep-sea diving

• George Thomas Beilby born 1850: invented process for retorting shale; industrial synthesis of alkaline cyanides
• Nicolas Lemery born 1645: pharmaceutical chemistry; influential and widely translated treatise on chemistry Cours de chymie.

• Seth Boyden born 1788: invented a process for manufacturing malleable iron, but did not patent his inventions
• Louis Daguerre born 1789 (or 1787?): photographic pioneer, inventor of the daguerreotype
• George Bogdan Kistiakowsky born 1900: reaction rates, science policy.
• George Wald born 1906: chemistry of vision; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1967.

• Humphry Davy announced the isolation of sodium (Na, element 11) and potassium (K, 19) to the Royal Society, 1807. (Read excerpts of Davy's announcement.)
• Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov born 1711: suggested law of conservation of mass; suggested that heat was a form of motion; recorded freezing of mercury; opponent of phlogiston theory
• James Batcheller Sumner born 1887: enzymes and proteins; crystallized urease and showed it to be a protein; Nobel Prize, 1946
• Earl Sutherland born 1915: mechanism of hormone action, including role of cyclic AMP; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1971.

• Karl von Frisch born 1886: zoologist, chemical and visual perception of fish and bees; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1973.

• Vladimir Nikolaievich Ipatieff born 1867: high-pressure catalysis; petroleum chemistry
• Hieronymus Theodor Richter [auf Deutsch] born 1824: codiscoverer of indium (In, element 49).

• Andrew Fielding Huxley born 1917: co-discoverer of ionic mechanism of neural conductance; gransdon of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1963.
• The Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center announced a process to extract water and oxygen from moon soil, 1970. (Learn more about human space flight and about water on the moon.)
• Dmitri Mendeleev stated that gallium (Ga, element 31) is identical to eka-aluminum, 1875. View early versions (1869, 1871) of Mendeleev's periodic table or his retrospective of the periodic law 20 years later.

• Rachel Fuller Brown born 1898: biochemist, co-discoverer of the fungicide nystatin (US patent 2,797,183), the first antibiotic used effectively to treat human fungal infections.
• Campbell Soup Company incorporated, 1922.
• Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley born 1887: discovered that X-ray frequency is related to atomic number of elements. Moseley was killed in World War I.
• Johannes Diderik van der Waals born 1837: equation of state for non-ideal gases (van der Waals equation), intermolecular interactions (van der Waals forces), electrolytic dissociation, capilarity; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1910.

• Robert Banks born 1921: polyethylene and polypropylene (US patent 2,825,721).
• Publication of Charles Darwin's seminal work on evolution, On the Origin of Species, 1859. Not a chemistry event, but surely an epochal event in science. (See also Alfred Russel Wallace.)

• Julius Robert von Mayer born 1814: conservation of energy

• Beckman Instruments (now Beckman Coulter) incorporated, 1934.
• Charles Hatchett announced discovery of columbium (niobium, Nb, element 41) before Royal Society, 1801.
• John Alexander Reina Newlands born 1837: classification of elements ("law of octaves")
• Charles Adolphe Wurtz born 1817: synthesis of hydrocarbons (Wurtz reaction), methyl & ethyl amines, phosphorous oxychloride, and glycol. Read his account of the Karlsruhe Congress.
• Karl Ziegler born 1898: polymerization through organometallic catalysis; plastics; Nobel Prize, 1963.

• Lars Onsager born 1903: thermodynamics of irreversible reactions; Nobel Prize, 1968
• Anders Celsius born 1701: set up a centigrade temperature scale with 0 at the boiling point of water and 100 at the freezing point. Today's Celsius scale has 0 at the freezing point and 100 at the boiling point.
• Chaim Weizmann born 1874: biological synthesis of acetone; first president of Israel.

• Maurice Arveson born 1902: petroleum technology, including hydrocarbon conversion patent 2,360,463. (Visit US National Energy Technology Laboratory's Strategic Center for Natural Gas & Oil.)
• First pure compound of berkelium (Bk, element 97) announced, based on work at the University of California, Berkeley, 1962.
• John Wesley Hyatt born 1837: inventor of the plastic celluloid.
• Antoine Lavoisier gave himself up to the revolutionary French government, 1793. He would be imprisoned until executed by the guillotine the following year.
• Alfred Nobel obtained a patent for smokeless gunpowder (Ballistite), 1887. (View a short history of explosives.)

• Wallace Broecker born 1931: ocean cirulcation; carbon cycle; global climate change.
• Yuan Tseh Lee born 1936: molecular beam study of gas-phase reactions; Nobel Prize, 1986.

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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