This Week in the History of Chemistry		January	February	March	April
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See also This Month in the History of the Periodic Table (with links to a searchable online map).

February 16-March 1

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

• Julius Thomsen born 1826: heats of reaction, relative strength of acids, manufacture of soda from cryolite
• John Rex Whinfield born 1901: terephthalic acid polyester fibers (terylene).
• Robert Williams born 1886: isolation, synthesis, and manufacture of Vitamin B₁ (thiamine).

• Friedrich Konrad Beilstein born 1838: his standard reference work on organic chemistry was first published in 1880-83.
• Wallace Henry Coulter born 1913: instrument maker; developed instrumentation to characterize particles.
• Dmitri Mendeleev sketched his first draft periodic table, 1869.
• Otto Stern born 1888: quantization of angular momentum (Stern-Gerlach experiment); Nobel Prize (physics), 1943.

• Harry Brearley born 1871: development of stainless steel
• John Sinfelt born 1931: platinum-iridium catalysts in petroleum refining. Read a book chapter by Sinfelt on materials and catalysis.
• Frederick Soddy introduced the term "isotopic" (meaning "same place") for elements which share the same place in the periodic table in 1913.
• Alessandro Volta born 1745: invented the voltaic pile, the first electric battery; discovered and isolated methane. The unit of electric potential, the volt, is named in his honor. Link to some of his writings (in Italiano) or to his museum/monument, the Tempio Voltiano.

• Svante Arrhenius born 1859: electrolytic dissociation, viscosity, reaction rates, and even the greenhouse effect; Nobel prize, 1903
• Jennifer Doudna born 1964: CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing; Nobel Prize, 2020
• Louis-Georges Gouy born 1854: interfacial electrical double layer; magnetic susceptibility (Gouy balance).
• Gottlieb Sigismund Kirchhoff born 1764: catalytically produced glucose from starch.
• Roderick MacKinnon born 1956: structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels; Nobel Prize, 2003
• Ernest Marsden born 1889: scattering of alpha particles (work with Hans Geiger in Ernest Rutherford's lab), contributing to the development of the nuclear model of the atom. (Read 1909 and 1913 papers with Geiger.)
• One atom of mendelevium (Md, element 101) was produced by Gregory R. Choppin, Glenn Seaborg, Bernard G. Harvey, and Albert Ghiorso in 1955 by bombarding a billion atoms of ²⁵³Es with helium.
• Ferdinand Reich born 1799: codiscovered indium (In, element 49)

• Isaak Adams, Jr. born 1836: pioneer in nickel plating.
• Ludwig Boltzmann born 1844: statistical mechanics; thermodynamics, especially the second law; Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecular speeds; Stefan-Boltzmann law of blackbody radiation; Boltzmann constant is named after him
• Henry Eyring born 1901: chemical kinetics (transition-state theory, Eyring equation)
• Helen Murray Free born 1923: diagnostic chemistry: reagents and instrumentation for clinical diagnosis in blood and urine chemistry, histology, and cytology
• Robert Huber born 1937: three-dimensional structure of proteins involved in photosynthesis; Nobel Prize, 1988
• Ernest Orlando Lawrence received a US Patent 1,948,384 for the cyclotron, 1934. (Link to a story about the 11-inch cyclotron's travels or to page on the 88-inch cyclotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or to a cyclotron simulation applet.)

• Carl Henrik Dam born 1895: vitamin K as a dietary factor in blood clotting; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1943.
• Humphry Davy read paper introducing the name chlorine (to replace oxymuriatic acid) and asserting its elementary nature, 1811.
• Oliver Wolcott Gibbs born 1822: early American inorganic and analytical chemist (Harvard); founding member of US National Academy of Sciences
• Edwin Land demonstrated Polaroid camera to optical society meeting, 1947. See National Historical Chemical Landmark on instant photography.
• John Mercer born 1791: treated cotton with caustic soda (mercerized cotton); calico printer who discovered dyes and processes
• Dorothy Virginia Nightingale born 1902: synthetic organic chemistry, particularly reactions of alkylbenzenes in the presence of aluminum chloride; Garvan Medal, 1959

• Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted born 1879: acid-base theory and properties of ions; kinetics and catalysis; nitramide
• Heinrich Hertz born 1857: discovered electromagnetic waves and the photoelectric effect.
• Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen born 1824: astronomical spectroscopy and photography, particularly of the Sun; found a line in the solar spectrum subsequently identified with helium.
• Fritz Strassmann born 1902: nuclear fission.
• Friedrich Wöhler wrote a letter to J. J. Berzelius stating that he had synthesized urea, an early synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic materials, 1828.

• First organizational meeting of the Chemical Society of London, 1841. (The Royal Society of Chemistry is its successor organization.)
• Casimir Funk born 1884: discovered vitamins and named them vitamines
• Charles Martin Hall first produced electrolytic aluminum in 1886. (See article on his patents).
• Thomas Midgley, Jr., received US patent 1,573,846 for tetraethyllead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline, 1926.
• Glenn Theodore Seaborg and coworkers chemically identified plutonium (Pu, element 94) at University of California, Berkeley, 1941.

• First atom of element 107, eventually named Bohrium (Bh) was observed at GSI Laboratories, Darmstadt, Germany in 1981.
• John Gorham born 1783: wrote Elements of Chemical Science, an early American chemistry text. (View a contemporary review of it.)
• Karl Graebe born 1841: organic synthesis (alizarin) and nomenclature (ortho, meta, para prefixes).
• William Summer Johnson born 1913: synthesis of complex molecules
• Eugène Melchior Peligot born 1811: isolated uranium metal; identified glucose in diabetics' urine.

• Ruth Erica (Leroi) Benesch born 1925: oxygen-carrying capacity of hemoglobin; role of sulfur in proteins
• Arthur Becket Lamb born 1880: editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1917-1949.
• Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene born (as Fishel Aaronovich Lenin) 1869: biochemistry, hexosamines, and stereochemistry.
• Ida Eva Noddack born (as Ida Tacke) 1896: co-discoverer of rhenium (Re, element 75) with husband Walter and Otto Berg; suggested (correctly) that nuclear fission rather than transuranic elements explained results reported by Enrico Fermi.
• Mary Locke Petermann born 1908: ribosomes and protein synthesis

• Marjorie Beckett Caserio born 1929: physical organic chemistry: kinetics and mechanisms; chemical education: Basic Principles of Organic Chemistry
• Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron born 1799: relationship between temperature, volume, and heat of vaporization (Clapeyron and Clausius-Clapeyron equations).
• Herbert Henry Dow born 1866: electrolytic production of bromine; founder of Dow Chemical.
• Giulio Natta born 1903: polymer chemistry including polymer stereochemistry; Nobel Prize, 1963
• William Joseph Sparks born 1905: advances in synthetic rubber.
• Ahmed Zewail born 1946: "femtochemistry" (dynamics on a sub-picosecond time scale); Nobel Prize, 1999

• James Chadwick's note announcing the possible discovery of the neutron is published in Nature, 1932.
• Robert Grubbs born 1942: metathesis reactions and catalysts; Nobel Prize, 2005.
• Alice Hamilton born 1869: occupational medicine; hazards of carbon monoxide, mercury, tetraethyllead, benzene, and others; first woman professor at Harvard.
• Felix Hoffmann received US patent 644,077 for acetyl salicylic acid (better known as aspirin), 1900.
• Karl Friedrich Wenzel died 1793 (birth date unknown c. 1740): stoichiometry; concentration determines the speed of chemical reactions.

• Edward Goodrich Acheson received US patent number 492,767 for production of artificial silicon carbide ("Carborundum"), 1893.
• Steven Chu: laser cooling and trapping of atoms; US Secretary of Energy; Nobel (physics), 1997.
• Edmond Fremy born 1814: plumbates, stannates, and ferrates; preparation of anhydrous hydrogen fluoride; coloring of flowers and saponification of fats
• Philip Showalter Hench born 1896: hormones of the adrenal cortex; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1950
• Linus Carl Pauling born 1901: molecular structure, bonding (hybrid orbitals), electronegativity, and resonance (The Nature of the Chemical Bond); Nobel Prize, 1954; Nobel Peace Prize, 1962

• Antoine-Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in uranium salts, 1896.
• Edward Franklin born 1862: chemistry of nitrogen compounds
• John MacLean born 1771: first professor of chemistry at Princeton, established first U.S. chemistry laboratory.
• Archer John Porter Martin born 1910: partition chromatography; Nobel Prize, 1952
• John Alexander Reina Newlands read a paper on the "Law of Octaves" before the Chemical Society, 1866; it was not well received.

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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