- Pierre-Louis Dulong born 1785: discovered nitrogen trichloride; refractive indices and specific heats of gases; law of Dulong and Petit (specific heat times atomic weight is the same for many elements, but not all that they claimed); suggested that acids were compounds of hydrogen; formula for heat content of fuel (Dulong formula)
- Moritz Traube born 1826: physiological chemist; semipermeable membranes, sugars, respiration, fermentation, putrefaction, oxidation, protoplasm, and muscle
- Heinrich Caro born 1834: Caro's acid (H2SO5), dye chemistry, including methylene blue.
- Étienne-François Geoffroy born 1672: chemical affinities; displacement reactions in salt
- Henry Clemens Pearson born 1858: rubber scientist and editor; see his books, Crude rubber and compounding ingredients and The rubber country of the Amazon
- Evan Jay Crane born 1889: editor of Chemical Abstracts, 1915-1958; co-author of A Guide to the Literature of Chemistry (1927).
- Herbert Aaron Hauptman born 1917: mathematical methods for crystal structures; Nobel Prize, 1985.
- Lydia Sesemann born 1845: first woman to receive a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Zürich and probably the first woman in the world to receive a doctorate in chemistry
- Lawrencium (Lr, element 103) was produced in 1961 by Torbjorn Sikkeland, Albert Ghiorso, and Almon Larsh and Robert Latimer, Berkeley Radiation Lab (later named Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
- Julius Nieuwland born 1878: synthetic rubber pioneer (US patent 1,811,959); acetylene chemistry.
- Agnes Pockels born 1862: liquid surfaces: surface tension and films; invention of the slide trough and surface film balance. Read her article on surface tension.
- Dennis Searle and E. M. Skillings found borax and other soluble salts near San Bernardino, CA, 1873.
- Anthony Carlisle born 1768: electrolysis of water, 1800. Read William Nicholson's account of the experiment.
- Hans K. A. S. von Euler-Chelpin born 1873: enzymes and fermentation; father of 1970 Nobel laureate Ulf Svante von Euler; Nobel Prize, 1929
- George Johnstone Stoney born 1826: suggested that electrical charge came in discrete units; coined term electron for "atom of electricity".
- 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).
- 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
- Hercule Florence born 1804: coined the term photographie; photographic pioneer.
| Back to This Week in the History of Chemistry. |
| Back to the top of the Classic Chemistry site |