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See also This Month in the History of the Periodic Table (with links to a searchable online map).

November 17-30

50-year, 100-year, 150-year, etc. anniversaries appear in bold red.
See also Today in Science History by Ian Ellis.

• 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 [en français].

• Patrick Blackett born 1897: development of the cloud chamber method in nuclear physics, with which he documented artificial transmutation of nitrogen by α particles as well as electron-positron interactions; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1948.
• 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.)
• Yuan Tseh Lee born 1936: molecular beam study of gas-phase reactions; Nobel Prize, 1986.
• 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.
• Richard Zare born 1939: laser-induced fluorescence; chemical reaction dynamics.

• Karl von Frisch born 1886: zoologist, chemical and visual perception of fish and bees; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1973.
• Arieh Warshel born 1940: computational biophysical chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2013.

• Vladimir Nikolaievich Ipatieff born 1867: high-pressure catalysis; terpenes; petroleum chemistry (at Universal Oil Products Riverside Laboratory).
• Hieronymus Theodor Richter born 1824: codiscoverer of indium (In, element 49).

• Andrew Fielding Huxley born 1917: co-discoverer of ionic mechanism of neural conductance; grandson 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's opinion that gallium (Ga, element 31) is likely identical to eka-aluminum is read to the French Academy, 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.
• William G. Kaelin Jr born 1957: oxygen sensing in cells, Nobel Prize (medicine), 2019.
• Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley born 1887: discovered that X-ray emission 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 by natural selection, 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, as National Inking Appliance, 1934.
• Elizabeth Helen Blackburn born 1948: telomerase; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2009.
• Charles Hatchett announced discovery of columbium (niobium, Nb, element 41) before Royal Society, 1801. Read his paper.
• 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.

• 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.
• Lars Onsager born 1903: thermodynamics of irreversible reactions; Nobel Prize, 1968
• 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; president of the American Chemical Society.
• 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 information from the Society of Explosives Engineers.)

• Wallace Broecker born 1931: ocean cirulcation; carbon cycle; global climate change.

• Chlortetracycline, a broad-spectrum antibiotic (also known as aureomycin), was isolated by Benjamin Minge Duggar at American Cyanamid (now part of BASF Agricultural Products), 1948. (It was the first of the tetracycline family of antibiotics.)
• Monsanto Chemical Company organized, 1901. Now part of Bayer, Monsanto was a focus of controversies around genetically modified foods and pesticides.
• Andrew Victor Schally born 1926: function and synthesis of hypothalamic hormones; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1977.
• Henry Taube born 1915: electron-transfer reactions; Nobel Prize, 1983.
• Smithson Tennant born 1761: discovered iridium (Ir, element 77) and osmium (Os, 76); determined that diamonds are pure carbon.
• Egor Egorevich Vagner (also known as Georg Wagner) born 1849: terpene chemistry; permanganate hydroxylation of alkenes; Wagner-Meerwein rearrangements

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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