August in Chemistry

• Joseph Henry Gilbert born 1817: nitrogen fertilizers
• Charles Robert Harington born 1897: biochemist; synthesized thyroxine with G. Barger
• George de Hevesy born 1885: radioisotopes; co-discoverer of hafnium (Hf, element 72); Nobel prize, 1943.
• Richard Kirwan born 1733: specific heats; defender of phlogiston eventually converted to antiphlogistic theories.
• Joseph Priestley first prepared oxygen, 1774.

• Albert Einstein sent letter about military implications of atomic energy to President Franklin Roosevelt, 1939.
• Leopold Gmelin born 1788: Gmelin's salt (potassium ferricyanide); test for bile pigments; History of science and chemistry [auf Deutsch]; Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie and its successor database. The 1843 edition of the handbook contains remarkable V-shaped table of elements.
• Benjamin Rush, professor of chemistry at College of Philadelphia, signed US Declaration of Independence, 1776.
• Friedrich Stromeyer born 1776: discoverer of cadmium (Cd, element 48); analysis of minerals.

• John Wilfred Linnett born 1913: molecular structure; combustion and flame kinetics.
• Koichi Tanaka born 1959: mass spectrometric analysis of biological macromolecules; Nobel prize 2002.
• George Whitesides born 1939: use of enzymes in organic synthesis; combination of chemistry, biology, biochemistry and material science.
• Alexander Williamson reads paper on synthesis of ethers to British Association, 1850.

• Jeanette Grasselli Brown born 1928: vibrational spectroscopy; edited Atlas of Spectral Data and Physical Constants for Organic Compounds; Garvan Medal, 1985
• Robert Williams and Robert Waterman are awarded US patent 2,049,988 for a process for obtaining vitamins, 1936.

• Seymour Richard Lipsky born 1924: electron capture detector; high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC).
• Thomas Burr Osborne born 1859: proteins and their amino acid content; Vitamin A and cod-liver oil.
• Standard Oil of New Jersey incorporated, 1882. Standard Oil was broken up in an antitrust action.

• Alexander Fleming born 1881: discoverer of penicillin; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1945.
• William Hyde Wollaston born 1766: discoverer of palladium (Pd, element 46) and rhodium (Rh, 45); equivalent weights. (View his paper on acid salts.)

• Germain Henri Hess born 1802 (or possibly August 8): thermochemistry; Hess's law in his terms and in modern terms
• (John) Paul Hogan born 1919: polyolefin plastics, including polypropylene and high-density polyethylene (HDPE).
• Arthur Michael born 1853: entropy-based theory of organic reactions; Michael addition reaction
• George Pimentel announced evidence of methane and ammonia detected near Mars by Mariner 7 spacecraft, 1969.

• Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac born 1902: relativistic quantum mechanics, including electron spin (Dirac equation); Nobel Prize (physics), 1933.
• Ernest Orlando Lawrence born 1901: nuclear chemist; built the first cyclotron; Nobel prize (Physics), 1939. Element 103 lawrencium, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were named in his honor.
• Benjamin Silliman born 1779: professor of chemistry at Yale; founder and editor of American Journal of Science.

• Amedeo Avogadro born 1776: hypothesized that equal volumes of gas contain equal numbers of molecules and that common gaseous elements were (in modern terminology) diatomic; Avogadro constant named after him (by Jean Perrin, 1909)
• William Alfred Fowler born 1911: nuclear synthesis of chemical elements in stars; Nobel prize (Physics), 1983.
• Erich Hückel born 1896: colligative properties; electrolyte activity (Debye-Hückel theory); molecular orbital methods (Hückel theory); Hückel rule for aromaticity.
• Patent for production of taxol, an important cancer drug, issued to Robert Holton, 1994.
• William Thomas Green Morton born 1819: demonstrated ether as an anesthetic at Massachusetts General Hospital.
• Aleksandr Vasil'evich Topchiev born 1907: Soviet petrochemical industry.

• Louis Brus born 1943: quantum dots; Nobel prize, 2023.
• Chester Garfield Fisher born 1881: Fisher Scientific
• Felix Hoffmann of Bayer made a stable derivative of salicylic acid in 1897. This pain-reliever had fewer side effects than the parent acid, and is now known as aspirin.
• Henry Moseley, who discovered atomic number, was killed at Gallipoli in World War I, 1915.
• Arne Tiselius born 1902: biochemist; electrophoresis; Nobel prize, 1948.

• Bristol-Myers (now Bristol-Myers Squibb) incorporated 1933.
• Erwin Chargaff born 1905: base-pairing in DNA
• Harold Baily Dixon born 1852: combustion and explosions of gases
• Christiaan Eijkman born 1858: discovered Vitamin B₁ (thiamine) and its role in beriberi; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1929.
• Cato Maximilian Guldberg born 1836: formulated law of mass action (with brother-in-law Peter Waage)
• Aaron Klug born 1926: investigation of nucleic-acid protein complexes with crystallographic electron microscopy; Nobel prize, 1982

• Margaret Burbidge born Eleanor Margaret Peachey 1919: stellar nucleosynthesis of chemical elements; president of AAAS; director of Royal Observatory (Greenwich, UK)
• Joseph Lister first uses antiseptic chemicals in surgery, 1865. Read part of his report.
• James Muspratt born 1793: manufacture of acids; father of James Sheridan Muspratt (author of Chemistry, Theoretical, Practical and Analytical as applied and relating to the Arts and Manufactures).
• Erwin Schrödinger born 1887: quantum mechanics (wave mechanics); Schrödinger equation; Nobel prize (Physics), 1933

• Anders Jonas Ångström born 1814: emission and absorption spectra of chemical elements; angstrom unit = 10^-10 m.
• Salvador Luria born 1912: microbial genetics; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1969
• Julian Friedrich Miescher born 1844: discovered nucleic acids.
• John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) and William Ramsay made preliminary announcement of the discovery of argon (Ar, element 18) at BAAS meeting, 1894.
• Frederick Sanger born 1918: structure of proteins including insulin; base-pair sequences of nucleic acids; Nobel prize, 1958 and 1980.
• George Gabriel Stokes born 1819: mathematical physicist; fluorescence (Stokes shift is named for him); spectroscopy; fluid dynamics (Navier-Stokes equations)
• Richard Martin Willstätter born 1872: aliphatic amines and alkaloids; Nobel prize, 1915

• Oswaldo Luiz Alves born 1947: nanotechnology
• Paul Doughty Bartlett born 1907: kinetics and mechanisms of organic reactions
• Richard Robert Ernst: high-resolution NMR spectroscopy, particularly Fourier-transform and two-dimensional methods; Nobel prize, 1991.
• May Sybil Leslie born 1887: decay of thorium and characterization of isotopes of radon (known then as emanations of thorium and actinium)
• Hans Christian Ørsted born 1777: first to isolate aluminum (Al, element 13); electricity and magnetism (Ørsted effect)

• Louis de Broglie born 1892: wave-particle duality (de Broglie relation); Nobel Prize (physics), 1929.
• Gerty Theresa Cori (née Radnitz) born 1896: carbohydrate metabolism; discovered how glycogen is catalytically converted; Nobel prize (Medicine) (with husband, Carl), 1947.
• Richard Heck born 1931: palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis; Nobel prize, 2010.
• William Augustus Tilden born 1842: specific heats of elements; organic bases and alkaloids. Read his Famous Chemists.

• Frederic Stanley Kipping born 1863: optical activity, organosilicon compounds, particularly silicones.
• Johan Kjeldahl born 1849: analytical method for nitrogen; Kjeldahl flask.
• Anne L'Huillier born 1958; electron dynamics via attosecond pulses of electromagnetic radiation, Nobel Prize (Physics), 2023.
• Wendell Meredith Stanley born 1904: chemical nature of viruses; crystallized tobacco mosaic virus; Nobel prize, 1946

• Aldrich Chemical (now part of Millipore Sigma) established 1951
• Walter Noddack born 1893: co-discoverer of rhenium (Re, element 75) with wife Ida and Otto Berg
• John Francis Queeny born 1859: founded Monsanto, one of the world's most controversial agribusinesses, now a part of Bayer

• Hewlett Packard incorporated, 1947.
• Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen found a line in the solar spectrum subsequently identified with helium, 1868.
• First oral contraceptive, Enovid, marketed by G D Searle (now part of Pfizer), 1960.

• Johan Gottlieb Gahn born 1745: discovered and isolated manganese (Mn, element 25)
• Julius Lothar Meyer born 1830: periodic law; in particular periodicity of atomic volume. [Link to more information: Meyer's 1870 table of the elements]

• Jöns Jakob Berzelius born 1779: meticulous analyst; elemental symbols; compiled accurate table of atomic weights; discovered selenium (Se, element 48), cerium (Ce, 58), silicon (Si, 14), and thorium (Th, 90); concepts of allotropy, catalysis, and isomerism; dualistic theory of bonding; term "halogen"
• Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner isolated first macroscopic quantity of plutonium (Pu, element 94) at University of Chicago, 1942.
• First version of John A. R. Newlands' law of octaves published, 1864. This arrangement of the elements in order of atomic weight shows periodic behavior. (Octave analogy was used but not yet called law of octaves.)
• Hideki Shirakawa born 1936: conductive polymers; Nobel Prize, 2000.

• Charles-Frédéric Gerhardt born 1816: organic structures: theory of residues, theory of types, homologous series; atomic weights; Traité de Chimie Organique (4 volumes, en français)
• Warren Kendall Lewis born 1882: thermal properties of materials and colloids; idea for fluid bed reactor; MIT chemical engineer
• William Murdoch born 1754: coal gas for lighting; steam engine.
• Jean Servais Stas born 1813: chemical analysis and determination of atomic weights

• Willis Rodney Whitney born 1868: director of General Electric research laboratories

• Robert Curl born 1933: fullerenes (see paper in Nature); Nobel Prize, 1996
• Bradley Dewey born 1887: "czar" of WW II synthetic rubber production
• Konstantin Novoselov born 1974: graphene; Nobel Prize (Physics), 2010.
• Thomas Steitz born 1940: ribosome; Nobel Prize, 2009.
• Hamilton Smith born 1931: restriction enzymes; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1978

• Elizabeth Hazen born 1885: co-discoverer of the fungicide nystatin (US patent 2,797,183), the first antibiotic used effectively to treat human fungal infections.
• Morris Kharasch born 1895: synthetic applications of free-radical chemistry
• PPG Industries incorporated, 1883

• Giacomo Luigi Ciamician born 1857: essential oils of plants; plant biochemisty; prophet of solar energy.
• Hans Adolf Krebs born 1900: urea cycle, citric acid cycle (Krebs cycle), and glyoxylate cycle in biochemistry; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1953.
• Herbert Kroemer born 1928: semiconductor heterostructures; Nobel Prize (physics), 2000.
• Frederick Chapman Robbins born 1916: growth of viruses in tissue culture; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1954.
• Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin born 1812: founding president of the Russian Chemical Society (now the Mendeleev Russian Chemical Society); reduction of aromatic nitro compounds to amines; benzidine rearrangement.

• Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier born 1743: significance of oxygen and oxygen theory of combustion; practical use of conservation of mass principle; new chemical nomenclature; leader of the "Chemical Revolution" (a "revolution that never happened"?), victim of the French Revolution. [View paper recognizing the substance in the air responsible for the calcination of metals, work on the composition of water, and excerpts (preface, table of elements, and caloric) from Elements of Chemistry. See also a searchable electronic edition of his Oeuvres at CNRS (French national center for scientific research) en Français.]
• William Henry Perkin obtained a provisional patent for the first aniline dye, later named mauveine, 1856. View one of Perkin's dyed samples.
• Texaco incorporated as the Texas Corporation, 1926.

• Carl Bosch born 1874: commercial method (Haber-Bosch process) of producing ammonia; Nobel Prize, 1931
• Martin David Kamen born 1913: radioactive tracer techniques in biochemistry; discovered carbon-14.
• First commercially productive oil well in the US, 1859, in Titusville, PA.
• Osamu Shimomura born 1928: green fluorescent protein, GFP; Nobel Prize, 2008.

• George Hoyt Whipple born 1878: pernicious anemia and diabetes; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1934

• Meitnerium (Mt, Element 109, named after Lise Meitner), first observed at GSI Laboratory, Darmstadt, Germany, 1982.
• Hermann Johann Sprengel born 1834: discharge tubes; vacuum pump

• Franz Hofmeister born 1850: protein structure; peptide bond; amino acids; pharmaceutical chemistry.
• Edward Mills Purcell born 1912: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy; Nobel Prize (physics), 1952. (See a collection of references and weblinks on history of NMR and MRI.)
• Ernest Rutherford born 1871: distinguished between α and β radiation and later characterized the α particle; radioactive half life; discovered radon (Rn, element 86) (with Harriet Brooks); transformation theory of radioactivity; nuclear model of the atom; artificial nuclear transmutation; Nobel Prize, 1908 (yes, in chemistry). Rutherfordium (Rf, element 104) is named for him.
• Theodor Svedberg born 1884: ultracentrifuge for molecular weights and sizes of proteins; Nobel Prize, 1926
• United Nations Environment Program announces the end of the era of leaded gasoline after Algeria ended sales, 2021. (Leaded fuels are still used in aviation.)
• Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff born 1852: proposed tetrahedral carbon; chemical kinetics, themodynamics (van't Hoff equation), dilute solutions, osmotic pressure; first Nobel Prize, 1901. Read his Chemistry in Space

• Guillaume Amontons born 1663: instrument maker, particularly thermometers, barometers, and hygrometers.
• Michel-Eugène Chevreul born 1786: dyes and color; stearin and margarine.
• Milestone in chemotherapy: injection of a chemical agent (later known as Salversan) into a syphilitic rabbit under the direction of Paul Ehrlich (who coined the term chemotherapy, applying it broadly to chemical treatments--not only of cancer), 1909.
• Friedrich Adolf Paneth born 1887: dating of rocks from helium formation
• Adolf Pinner born 1842: nicotine structure, organic synthesis.

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