May in Chemistry

• Johann Jakob Balmer born 1825: Balmer series in hydrogen atom spectrum.
• Hilaire Bernigaud de Chardonnet born 1839: invented rayon by forcing liquid nitrocellulose through fine glass capillaries.
• Paracelsus born 1493 or 1494 (date uncertain; May 1 is one date given): founder of iatrochemistry (the application of chemistry to medicine); developed a cure for St. Vitus disease; believed the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) were present in substances as three principles (tria prima): mercury (volatility and fusibility), sulfur (inflammability), and salt (incombustibility). [Link to writings of Paracelsus: The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists, The Book Concerning The Tincture Of The Philosophers, The Aurora of the Philosophers, and Coelum Philosophorum (all at the Alchemy site).]
• Alexander William Williamson born 1824: alcohols and ethers (synthesis of ethers, with important consequences in organic structure theory); suggested the notion that catalysis can proceed through intermediate compounds; synthesis of ethylene glycol.

• Frank Austin Gooch born 1852: developed filter crucible (Gooch crucible); electrolytic analysis of metals; distillation for the analysis of boric acid.
• BF Goodrich incorporated, 1912.
• Elizabeth Cavert Miller born 1920: activity of chemical carcinogens
• William Nicholson places wires connected to a battery in water, observing its electrolysis, 1800.
• George Claude Pimentel born 1922: physical chemistry (chemical lasers, matrix-isolation techniques); chemical instrumentation; chemical education

• 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.

• Dow Chemical incorporated, 1897.
• Vincent Du Vigneaud born 1901: biochemistry of sulfur compounds; identified biotin; synthesized hormones oxytocin and vasopressin; Nobel Prize, 1955.
• Robley Evans born 1907: nuclear medicine, uptake of radioisotopes in the body.
• Thomas Midgley, Jr., born 1889: introduced tetraethyllead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline (see US patent 1,573,846); invention of chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants (see US patent 1,833,847).

• John Jacob Abel born 1857: "Father of American pharmacology"; isolated epinephrine (adrenaline); crystallized insulin.
• Ralph Landau born 1916: industrial chemistry and chemical engineering; terephthalic acid, propylene oxide, and cyclohexane oxidation processes
• Max Ferdinand Perutz born 1914: determined the structure of hemoglobin and other proteins by X-ray diffraction; Nobel Prize, 1962
• Mikhail Tswett born 1872: invention of chromatography; plant pigments such as chlorophylls and carotenoids.

• Eduard Buchner born 1860: discovered alcoholic fermentation without yeast (due to the collection of enzymes known as zymase); Nobel Prize, 1907. See a book on Buchner's work and subsequent developments over 100 years.
• Erika Cremer born 1900: theory and development of gas chromatography; chemical kinetics
• William Hewlett born 1913: analytical instrumentation and computers; Hewlett Packard.
• James Lind begins an experiment in which he controls the diet of sailors afflicted with scurvy, 1747; those who receive lemons and oranges show marked improvement.
• Hans Meerwein born 1879: oxonium ions and Wagner-Meerwein rearrangements.
• Francis Owen Rice born 1890: free radicals.

• William Nicholson died 1815 (birth date unknown in 1753): electrolysis of water; scientific journal publisher; made a hydrometer.
• Bengt Samuelsson born 1934: prostaglandins; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1982.

• Gladys Amelia Anslow born 1892: spectroscopy of proteins and amino acids; high energy physics
• Herbert Brown born (as Herbert Brovarnik) 1912: organoboron chemistry; carbocations; Nobel Prize, 1979.
• George Simms Hammond born 1921: organic photochemistry, including commercial developments; solution photochemistry; free-radical reactions.
• George Olah born 1927: carbocations and their role in hydrocarbon reactions; Nobel Prize, 1994.
• Louis Pasteur announced separation of optical isomers (mechanical separation of asymmetric crystals), 1848.

• John Bardeen born 1908: transistors and semiconductors; superconductivity (BCS theory); Nobel Prize (physics), 1956 and 1972.
• Edgar Fahs Smith born 1854: complex inorganic acids; history of chemistry (ACS Division for the History of Chemistry; Edgar Fahs Smith collection). Read his history of chemistry in America.

• Aaron Dexter appointed first professor of chemistry and materia medica at the newly organized Harvard Medical School, 1783.
• Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit born 1686: improved thermometers by using mercury; Fahrenheit temperature scale; investigation of boiling points of liquids.

• First fluid bed reactor began commercial operation, 1942, in Baton Rouge, LA.
• Stuart Perry of New York city obtains US patent 3597 for a gas engine, 1844. The engine used turpentine gases as fuels; patent covered both air-cooled and water-cooled versions.
• Pieter Zeeman born 1865: splitting of spectral lines by magnetic fields (Zeeman effect); Nobel Prize (physics), 1902

• Helen Marie Dyer born 1895: nutrition: dietary substitutes and effects of nutrition on gastric function

• John Bailar, Jr., born 1904: discovered optical inversion and explained stereospecificity in complex inorganic reactions.
• John Douglas Cockcroft born 1897: artificial transmutation of elements by bombarding nuclei (view apparatus and two short papers); Nobel Prize (physics), 1951.
• Theodor Curtius born 1857: chemistry of hydrazines and azides; Curtius rearrangement.
• Kasimir Fajans born 1887: radioactive displacement law; introduced concept of heat of hydration of gaseous ions.
• Mary Fieser born 1909: natural product chemistry; coauthor of Reagents for Organic Synthesis
• Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder born 1911: structure and properties of gases and liquids; statistical mechanics; flame propagation; quantum mechanics; chemical kinetics.
• Lars Fredrick Nilson born 1840: discovered scandium (Sc, element 21).

• Antoine Bussy born 1794: isolated magnesium (Mg, element 12).
• General Electric announced synthesis of gem-grade diamonds, 1970.

• Julius Axelrod born 1912: catecholamines; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1970.
• Henry Aaron Hill born 1915: first African-American president of American Chemical Society.

• Louis Ignarro born 1941: role of nitric oxide signaling in cardiovacular system; Nobel (medicine), 1998.
• Austin McDowell Patterson born 1876: editor of Chemical Abstracts; contributions to chemical information and chemical nomenclature.
• William Ramsay and Morris William Travers discovered krypton (Kr, element 36), 1898.
• Betty Sullivan born 1902: wheat biochemistry with applications to baking and flour; Garvan Medal, 1952.

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