July in Chemistry

• 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
• 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
• Theodore Harold Maiman born 1927: invented ruby laser (first operable optical laser, US patent 3,353,115; see original paper)

• Claude Bernard born 1813: discovered glycogen; research on digestion.
• Mildred Cohn born 1906: isotopic labeling and isotope effects
• Elias James Corey born 1928: synthetic organic chemist, Nobel Prize, 1990.
• George Eastman born 1854: inventor and manufacturer of Kodak films and cameras. [Link to George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.]
• William Ramsay and Morris Travers discovered xenon (Xe, element 54).

• Stanislao Cannizzaro born 1826: His outline of a course in chemical philosophy was instrumental in gaining acceptance of Avogadro's hypothesis and putting atomic weights on a common basis; Cannizzaro reaction in organic chemistry. [Link to Cannizzaro archive (in italiano).]

• André Louis Debierne born 1874: radiochemistry, discovered actinium (Ac, element 89). (Link to a birthday card to actinium, in French, written, fancifully, from Debierne's perspective.)
• Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas born 1800: organic chemist (isolated anthracene from coal tar); vapor density method (Dumas method) for determination of atomic and molecular weights; theories of organic radicals and of chemical types. Read his Traité de chimie appliquée aux arts
• Ferdinand II de' Medici born 1610: invented a sealed thermometer; patron of scientists, including Galileo
• Joseph Priestley's home (including his laboratory) in Birmingham, England, was destroyed by a rioting mob, 1791. Priestley eventually moved to the US.
• Mary Lura Sherrill born 1888: organic synthesis of antimalarial compounds; Garvan Medal, 1947. (Link to a review of antimalarial compounds.)
• Geoffrey Wilkinson born 1921: inorganic chemistry (sandwich compounds, such as ferrocene; complex hydrides, homogeneous catalysis); Nobel Prize, 1973

• William Baker born 1915: molecular structure; solid state materials; physical propoerties of polymers
• Max Bodenstein born 1871: chemical kinetics, including chain reactions. (View some data from his investigations of the kinetics and equilibrium of the reaction between hydrogen and iodine.)
• Albert Ghiorso born 1915: co-discoverer of transuranic elements americium (Am, element 95), curium (Cm, 96), berkelium (Bk, 97), californium (Cf, 98), einsteinium (Es, 99), fermium (Fm, 100), mendelevium (Md, 101), nobelium (No, 102), lawrencium (Lr, 103), rutherfordium (Rf, 104), dubnium (Db, 105; hahnium was proposed name), and seaborgium (Sg, 106).
• Robert Bruce Merrifield born 1921: solid-phase peptide synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1984
• The Royal Society (UK), one of the oldest scientific societies, was granted a charter by Charles II, 1662. View page images of its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings at the National Library of France (yes, France).

• Atomic bomb test, Trinity Site, Alamogordo Air Force Base, 1945.
• Joseph Goldberger born 1874: physician in the US public health service; linked pellagra to a dietary deficiency. See part of his report.
• Irwin Rose born 1926: protein chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2004, "for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation."
• Alfred Stock born 1876: boron hydrides, mercury poisoning.

• Frederick Augustus Abel born 1827: co-inventor of cordite; Abel tester for petroleum flash point

• Roald Hoffmann born 1937: molecular orbital theory; Woodward-Hoffmann rules (conservation of orbital symmetry); Nobel Prize, 1981.
• Robert Hooke born 1635: best known as a physicist for his work on elasticity and a biologist for microscopy (Micrographia), Hooke also studied gases.
• Hendrik Antoon Lorentz born 1853: structure of matter and optical properties; Zeeman effect; Nobel prize (Physics) 1902 with Zeeman.
• Hartmut Michel born 1948: structure of photosynthetic proteins; Nobel Prize, 1988.
• Frederick Dominic Rossini born 1899: numerical reference data in thermodynamics.

• Eleuthère du Pont began construction of gunpowder factory (precursor of DuPont), 1802.
• Allene Jeanes born 1906: food chemist, first woman to win USDA Distinguished Service Award, 1953.
• Rosalyn Sussman Yalow born 1921: developed radioimmunoassay; Nobel Prize (Medicine) 1977.

• Gerd Binnig born 1947: scanning tunneling microscope; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1986.
• Tadeus Reichstein born 1897: hormones of the adrenal cortex; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1950.

• Georg Brandt born 1694: discovered cobalt (Co, element 27).
• Rudolph Arthur Marcus born 1923: theory of electron transfer reactions; Nobel prize, 1992. Marcus is the M of RRKM theory; read a retrospective paper by Marcus.
• Henri-Victor Regnault born 1810: thermometry and other thermal phenomena.

• Selman Abraham Waksman born 1888: discovery of antitubercular agent streptomycin; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1952. View the streptomycin patent.

• Emma Perry Carr born 1880: ultraviolet spectra of hydrocarbons; first recipient of ACS Garvan Medal, 1937.
• Icie Macy Hoobler born 1892: biochemistry related to nutrition of children, infants, and pregnant women
• Vladimir Prelog born 1906: organic stereochemistry, including Cahn-Ingold-Prelog rules for nomenclature; Nobel prize, 1975.

• William de Wiveleslie Abney born 1843: color photography and its chemistry.

• Colgate-Palmolive incorporated 1923
• Rosalind Franklin born 1920: X-ray crystallography of DNA; view Franklin typescript on structure of sodium thymonucleate.
• Andreas Libavius died 1616 (birth date unknown in 1540): author of Alchemia (or Alchymia) (perhaps first chemical textbook), fuming liquor of Libavius, ammonium sulfate, chemical analysis.

• Isaac Babbitt born 1799: invented babbitt's metal for bearings (an alloy of tin, antimony, and copper)
• A marriage of minds: Pierre Curie and Marja Sklodowska wed, 1895.
• Paul Walden born 1863: electrical conductivity and electrolytic dissociation; Walden inversion.

• Bertram Borden Boltwood born 1870: early radioactivity and radiochemistry research.
• Friedrich Dorn born 1848: discovered radon (Rn, element 86), an "emanation of radium" in 1900. (Note that Ernest Rutherford discovered an "emanation of thorium" (later recognized as an isotope of radon) in the same year.)
• Hans Fischer born 1881: research on hemin, chlorophyll, porphyrins, and related compounds; Nobel prize, 1930

• James Curtis Booth born 1810: methods for refining gold-silver bullion at US Mint, Philadelphia.

• Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat born 1910: separated viral RNA from protein and showed that RNA was the active agent, turning attention to the role of nucleic acids in heredity.
• Walter Julius Reppe born 1892: industrial organic chemistry (at BASF); high-pressure reactions of acetylene.
• Isidor Isaac Rabi born 1898: atomic and molecular beam spectroscopy; nuclear magnetic properties; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1944

• The "Charles" of Antwerp, Belgium, becomes the first "oil tanker", 1869, carrying oil from the U.S. to Europe in iron tanks below decks. See other energy history milestones from California Energy Commission.

• August Beer born 1825: Beer-Lambert law relating absorption of light to concentration of absorbing material
• Paul Delos Boyer born 1918: enzymatic mechanism of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1997.
• The first US patent was in industrial chemistry, issued in 1790 to Samuel Hopkins on a process for making potash and pearl ashes (signed by President Washington). [Link to US Patent and Trademark Office.]
• Stephanie Kwolek born 1923: invented Kevlar® (US patent 3,819,587); Perkin medal 1997.
• Primo Levi born 1919: chemically-trained memoirist; Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table; died by suicide (?) in 1987
• Sofia Simmonds born 1917: amino acid metabolism of bacteria; Garvan Medal, 1969.
• Friedrich Wöhler born 1800: synthesis of organic compounds from inorganic materials (oxalic acid and urea); isolated aluminum (Al, element 13) and beryllium (Be, 4); preparation of acetylene (ethyne) from calcium carbide

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