January in Chemistry

• Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA, originally Pittsburgh Reduction Company) renamed, 1907
• U. S. Atomic Energy Commission took over nuclear oversight from wartime Manhattan Engineer District, 1947. (Visit its successor, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)
• Cigarettes in the US must carry warning label, "Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health," since 1966, mandated by the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965. Since then, labeling requirements have evolved as has the FDA approach to tobacco.
• Eugène-Anatole Demarçay born 1852: discovered europium (Eu, element 63); spectroscopic evidence of the discovery of radium (Ra, 88)
• Robert John Kane proposed existence of ethyl radical (ethereum) in 1833 (before Liebig).
• Merck & Co. founded, 1891.

• Roger Adams born 1889: organic synthesis. An ACS award in organic synthesis is named for Adams.
• Isaac Asimov born 1920: biochemist; author of hundreds of books in science fiction and many non-fiction subjects (See Asimov bibliography.).
• Rudolf Clausius born 1822: fundamental contributions to thermodynamics and kinetic theory of gases; coined the term entropy. Read his Über die bewegende Kraft der Wärme auf Deutsch (Part I and Part II) or in English translation (Mechanical Theory of Heat).
• Charles Hatchett born 1765: discovered niobium (Nb, element 41), which he called columbium
• Walter Heitler born 1904: quantum-mechanical treatment of molecular hydrogen (Heitler-London approach).
• Julia Vsevolodovna Lermontova born 1847 [Gregorian date]: separation and atomic weight of platinum-group metals

• Henry Bradley, Binghamton, NY, patented oleomargarine (U.S. Patent No. 110,626) in 1871.
• Keith James Laidler born 1916: chemical kinetics; history of physical chemistry and of science and technology.

• Herbert Henry Dow, founder of Dow Chemical, prepared bromine from brine, 1891.
• Aristid Victor Grosse born 1905: isolated protactinium (Pa, element 91); ²³⁵U fission by slow neutrons
• Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau born 1737: one-time defender of phlogiston theory, chemical affinities, chemical nomenclature. View the 1787 Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique and Guyton's earlier (1782) paper on systematic nomenclature (both en français).
• Richard Royce Schrock born 1945: high-oxidation-state transition-metal complexes; metathesis reactions and catalysts; Nobel Prize, 2005.
• Spirit rover, a NASA geochemistry robot, lands on Mars, 2004, looking for evidence of water.
• John Edgar Teeple born 1874: industrial chemistry and chemical economics; Perkin medal.
• Florence Emeline Wall born 1893: cosmetic chemistry.

• Joseph Erlanger born 1874: electrophysiology of nerves; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1944.
• George Washington Carver died 1943 (born 1860s): food chemistry, particularly known for peanuts and sweet potatoes.

• John Van Nostrand Dorr born 1872: chemical engineer and inventor
• Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer born 1914: chemical bonding and quantum mechanics.
• Stuart Alan Rice born 1932: statistical mechanics and transport phenomena; phase transitions.

• Eilhard Mitscherlich born 1794: crystal structure, catalysis, benzene and its derivatives; discovered chemical isomorphism
• Henry Enfield Roscoe born 1833: chemical action of light; co-inventor of actinometer; first to isolate vanadium (V, element 23). Read his biography of Dalton and his autobiography .
• John Ernest Walker born 1941: mechanism of ATP synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1997

• John Allen Veatch found borax in mineral water at Tuscan Springs, CA, 1856.

• Richard Abegg born 1869: valence, especially Abegg's rule that the difference between the maximum positive and negative valence of an element is frequently eight.
• John Werner Cahn born 1928: thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transitions and diffusion; interfacial phenomena; periodic and quasi-periodic structures ("quasicrystals").
• Alec Jeffreys born 1950: genetic fingerprinting; see US Patent 5,413,908.
• Har Gobind Khorana born 1922: first synthesis of an artificial gene; interpretation of genetic code and protein synthesis function; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1968
• Søren Sørensen born 1868: indroduced concept of pH as a measure of hydrogen ion concentration; research on proteins, amino acids, and enzymes

• Sune Karl Bergström born 1916: purification and structure of prostaglandins; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1982.
• Katharine Burr Blodgett born 1898: thin films (Langmuir-Blodgett films); anti-reflective coatings; gas-surface interactions; Garvan Medal, 1951
• Frederick Gardner Cottrell born 1877: nitrogen fixation, liquefaction of gases, recovery of helium; invented electrostatic precipitator (Cottrell precipitator, US patent 895,729) for removing particles from gases

• Frederick Mark Becket born 1875: inventor in electrochemistry and electrometallurgy
• Roger Guillemin born 1924: function and synthesis of hypothalamic hormones; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1977.

• Johan August Arfwedson born 1792: discovered lithium (Li, 3) in the mineral petalite.
• Ruth Rogan Benerito born 1916: fat emulsions and transport of fat in animals; properties of cellulose (with applications to fabrics, particularly cotton)
• Jan Baptista van Helmont born 1579: coined the term gas; experiment investigating whether vegetable life came from a single, element (water). Read three short excerpts from his writings and see the title page of his book on medicine.
• Paul Hermann Müller born 1899: discovered the toxic effects of DDT on insects; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1948
• Franz von Soxhlet born 1848: invented Soxhlet Extractor; isolated lactose and milk proteins. [Thanks to Lee May for this entry.]
• Antonio de Ulloa born 1716: discoverer of platinum (Pt, 78).

• Eric Betzig born 1960: very high-resolution fluorescence microscopy; Nobel Prize, 2014.
• Sydney Brenner born 1927: genetics of organ development and cell death; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2002.
• Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction signed in Paris by 130 nations, 1993.
• Charles Mabery born 1850: early petroleum chemistry; electrolytic aluminum and bromine industries
• Pierre-Jean Robiquet born 1780: codiscoverer of asparagine; analysis of opium for codeine

• Armstrong World Industries incorporated as Armstrong Cork Co., 1895.
• Ludwig Claisen born 1851: condensation of esters; rearrangement of allyl vinyl ethers
• David Wesson born 1861: vegetable oils.

• Henry Cavendish reported quantitative composition of water to Royal Society, 1784.
• Pierre Samuel DuPont born 1870: president of DuPont credited with diversifying company from explosives to broad-based chemical company
• William Prout born 1785: Prout's hypothesis (suggestion that all atomic weights are multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen); analysis of biological materials; identified hydrochloric acid in the stomach
• Artturi Ilmari Virtanen born 1895: nutrition and development of food resources; nitrogen fixation; preservation of silage; Nobel Prize, 1945
• Cyrus Moors Warren born 1824: fractional distillation of coal tar and petroleum for analytical and industrial applications.
• Frank Westheimer born 1912: physical organic chemistry (electrostatic effects, molecular mechanics, photoaffinity labeling)

• Anders Ekeberg born 1767: discovered tantalum (Ta, element 73).
• Fermium (Fm, element 100) was first isolated by (left to right) Louise Smith, Sherman Fried, Gary Higgins; (back row) Albert Ghiorso, Rod Spence, Glenn Seaborg, Paul Fields and John Huizenga (using ion-exchange chromatorgraphy) and identified, 1953, at the Berkeley Radiation Lab (later named Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). Read proceedings of a symposium on the 25th anniversary of the discovery.
• Morten Meldal born 1954: click chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2022
• Leonor Michaelis born 1875: enzyme kinetics; Michaelis-Menten equation.

• Benjamin Franklin born 1706: scientist, inventor, statesman, printer, philosopher, musician, and economist; described marsh gas to Joseph Priestley.
• James Hall born 1761: geology: laboratory study of rock formation processes, artificial marble
• Robert Hare born 1781: invented oxyhydrogen blowtorch.
• Katalin Karikó born 1955 nucleoside base modifications that enabled mRNA vaccine technology; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2023
• Anselme Payen born 1795: discovered cellulose, dextrin (produced in the breakdown of starch), pectin, and the enzyme diastase (1833); developed processes for producing borax from boric acid and for refining beet sugar.

• Edward Frankland born 1825: theory of valency; sanitation and river pollution; organometalic synthesis and valence
• Johann (Hans) Goldschmidt born 1861: invented aluminothermite process (Goldschmidt process).

• Henry Bessemer born 1813: metallurgist, inventor of the Bessemer process and Bessemer converter for making steel (US patent 16,082). Read his autobiography.
• Harry Fisher born 1885: inventor in synthetic rubber and rubber technology
• Jack Halpern born 1925: mechanisms of the action of vitamins and other biochemicals.
• Lucy Weston Pickett born 1904: effects of X-rays on chemical reactions; X-ray crystallography; molecular spectroscopy; Garvan Medal, 1957
• Susan Solomon born 1956: atmospheric chemistry of ozone, particularly polar.
• James Watt born 1736: best known as an engineer whose version of the steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution, Watt was also one of the first to recognize that water was a compound substance.

• Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois born 1820: geologist whose 1862 arrangement of elements and other substances by atomic weight exhibited chemical periodicity. (See paper and Vis Tellurique figure.)
• Adolph Frank born 1834: made calcium cyanamide from calcium carbide and nitrogen.
• Marie Anne Paulze Lavoisier born 1758: research assistant, collaborator, illustrator, editor, publisher, and spouse of Antoine Lavoisier; later spouse (but not collaborator) of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. View and read about the portrait of the Lavoisiers by Jacque-Louis David.
• Horace Wells born 1815: first to use a gas (nitrous oxide) as an anesthetic.

• Dow Chemical produced the first ingot of any metal to be extracted from seawater (magnesium; Mg, element 12), 1941.
• Edward Mallinckrodt born 1845: founder of Mallinckrodt Chemical Works
• Konrad Bloch born 1912: cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism; Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1964.
• Eduard Zintl born 1898: intermetallic compounds; industrial chemistry.

• André-Marie Ampère born 1775: best known for Ampère's law relating magnetic field and electrical current, Ampère also made a hypothesis about gases much like Avogadro's.
• Francis Bacon born 1561: inductive scientific method; Novum Organum. Bacon applied his inductive method to the nature of heat.
• Alan Heeger born 1936: conducting polymers; Nobel Prize, 2000.

• The nomination of Marie Curie to the French Academy of Sciences was rejected, 1911.
• Otto Diels born 1876: codeveloper of diene synthesis (with Kurt Alder); practical method for synthesis of ring compounds from chain compounds (Diels-Alder reaction); Nobel Prize, 1950 (with Alder)
• Gertrude Belle Elion born 1918: pharmaceutical chemist; leukemia-fighting drug (US patent 2,884,667); Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1988.
• Karl Karlovich Klaus born 1796: discoverer of ruthenium (Ru, element 44); early platinum chemistry
• Paul Langevin born 1872: X-rays and magnetism
• John Charles Polanyi born 1929: used infrared chemiluminescence to follow excited reaction products; Nobel Prize, 1986. Read an interview of Polanyi.

• Burris Bell Cunningham and coworkers first reported absorption spectrum of einsteinium compound (Es, element 99) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1966.
• Gold discovered at Sutter's Mill, California, 1848, causing '49er gold rush.
• Berta Karlik born 1904: observed astatine (At, element 85) isotopes from radioactive decay; director of Radium Institute of Vienna
• Joseph-Achille Le Bel born 1847: structural organic chemistry (tetrahedral carbon).
• Patent for microwave oven (US patent 2,495,429) issued to Percy Spencer, 1950.
• Dan Shechtman born 1941: quasicrystals; Nobel Prize, 2011.
• Morris William Travers born 1872: codiscoverer of krypton (Kr, element 36), neon (Ne, 10), and xenon (Xe, 54) with William Ramsay; low temperature chemistry

• Robert Boyle born 1627: defined element; discovered inverse proportionality of gas pressure and volume (Boyle's law); experiments in vacuo (for example, trying to support combustion in a vacuum); author of The Sceptical Chymist and New experiments physico-mechanicall, touching the spring of the air and its effects; suggested use of alcohol as biological preservative
• Arvid Carlsson born 1923: dopamine, Parkinson's disease, and L-dopa (levodopa); Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2000.
• Fluoridation of drinking water begins in Grand Rapids, MI (first municipal water fluoridation in US), 1945.
• William Horne born 1865: refining and manufacture of sugar
• Csaba Horvath born 1930: concept of early HPLC (high-pressure liquid chromatography) instruments.
• Martin Klaproth reported to Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1798 the 1782 discovery by Franz Joseph Müller von Reichenstein of a new element and named it tellurium (Te, element 52).
• Opportunity rover, a NASA geochemistry robot, lands on Mars, 2004, looking for evidence of water.
• Ilya Prigogine born 1917: thermodynamics of irreversible processes; "dissipative" structures; Nobel Prize, 1977.

• Niels Bohr reported the discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, and its interpretation by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, to the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics, 1939.
• Claude Silbert Hudson born 1881: sugar chemistry; an ACS Award in Carbohydrate chemistry is named after him.
• Polycarp Kusch born 1911: magnetic moment of the electron; Nobel Prize (physics), 1955.
• Rachel Lloyd born 1839 as (Rachel Holloway): first American woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry (Zurich, 1887); research on sugar beets.

• John Carew Eccles born 1903: neurochemistry; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1963.
• Thomas Alva Edison receives US Patent 233,898 for incandescent light bulb, 1880. See more about his patents.
• Victor Moritz Goldschmidt born 1888: mineralogy, geochemistry, distribution and abundance of elements and isotopes
• Louis Kahlenberg born 1870: American physical chemist and electrochemist.
• August Kekule presented his structure of benzene to the Société Chimique, Paris, 1865.

• Henry Carrington Bolton born 1843: author and bibliographer in the history of chemistry. Read his Select Bibliography of Chemistry, 1492-1892 and Catalogue of Scientific and Technical Periodicals.
• Edith Flanigen born 1929: molecular sieves and petroleum refining catalysts.
• Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich born 1880: colloids (stabilization by electrolytes) and surfaces (Freundlich adsorption isotherm).
• Robert William Holley born 1922: structure and function of transfer-RNA; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1968.
• Tomas Lindahl born 1938: DNA repair; Nobel Prize, 2015.
• Kathleen Yardley Lonsdale born 1903: X-ray crystallography; determination of benzene structure by X-ray crystallography. Read reminiscences by Lonsdale from Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald.

• Linda Buck born 1947: research on olfaction, one of the "chemical senses;" Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2004.
• Sydney Chapman born 1888: geophysicist; diffusion in kinetic theory of gases; oxygen reactions for stratospheric ozone
• Edward Morley born 1838: ether drift experiments (Michelson-Morley experiment: read a modern description and the original paper); painstakingly precise determination of the atomic weight of oxygen
• Lewis Frederick Urry born 1927: inventor; alkaline batteries and lithium batteries.

• Peter Agre born 1949: water channels in cell membranes; Nobel Prize, 2003.
• Harold Simmons Booth born 1891: inorganic chemistry; fluoride gases
• George Gerald Henderson born 1862: catalysis
• Akira Yoshino born 1948: lithium ion batteries; Nobel Prize, 2019

• Irving Langmuir born 1881: surface chemistry (Langmuir adsorption isotherm, Langmuir-Blodgett films); inventor of gas-filled tungsten lamp (US patent 1,180,159), use of atomic hydrogen blowpipe for welding, condensation pump for high vacuum; atomic structure and valence (see two examples: 1 and 2); Nobel Prize, 1932
• Theodore William Richards born 1868: atomic weights, electrochemistry, and thermodynamics; ; discovered that lead from uranium and from thorium had different atomic weights; Nobel Prize, 1914.

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