October in Chemistry

• Air Products & Chemicals incorporated, 1940.
• Wilder Dwight Bancroft born 1867: founder of Journal of Physical Chemistry (now an ACS journal split into A, B, and C and letters sections); phase rule; colloids.
• Georg Bredig born 1868: German-Jewish chemist during the Nazi era; catalytic action of colloidal platinum; "poisoning" of catalysts; chair of electrochemistry at University of Karlsruhe (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology).
• Aaron Ciechanover born 1947: ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation; Nobel Prize, 2004
• Otto Frisch born 1904: interpretation of nuclear fission with Lise Meitner.

• Walter Baird born 1908: analytical instrument maker.
• Alexis Thérèse Petit born 1791: specific heats of solids (law of Dulong and Petit)
• William Ramsay born 1852: co-discoverer of neon (Ne, element 10), argon (Ar, 18), krypton (Kr, 36), and xenon (Xe, 54); isolated helium (He, 2); made a place for the noble gases in the periodic table; study of radium emanation (radon) and its production of helium; Nobel Prize, 1904. (Read a prediction of the discovery of neon or an account of the discovery of argon by his collaborator, Lord Rayleigh or his Gases of the Atmosphere.)
• John Ross born 1926: kinetics and thermodynamics of nonlinear systems far from equilibrium; complex reaction mechanisms.
• Alexander Robertus Todd born 1907: nucleotides and coenzymes; Nobel Prize, 1957

• John Gorrie born 1803: first refrigerator patent (US #8080)
• Charles John Pedersen born 1904: crown ethers; Nobel prize, 1987

• Kenichi Fukui born 1918: frontier molecular orbitals; Nobel Prize, 1981
• James Lind born 1716: physician who found the cause and cure of scurvy to be dietary (in modern terms, ascorbic acid deficiency). See his Treatise of the Scurvy.
• Eugene George Rochow born 1909: silicone chemistry
• Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, launched by Soviet Union, 1957.
• Kurt Wüthrich born 1938: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) structural studies of biological macromolecules; Nobel Prize, 2002.

• Chemical Society of Union College, a precursor of the American Chemical Society, founded in 1861.
• Dirk Coster born 1889: co-discoverer of hafnium (Hf, element 72)
• Mahlon Hoagland born 1921: discovered transfer RNA.
• Hamish Small born 1929: ion chromatography.

• Humphry Davy, working at the Royal Institution, isolated potassium, 1807.
• François Magendie born 1783: classic studies in nutrition and experimental pharmacology; importance of proteins; effects of morphine, strychnine, and other chemical agents on human beings.
• William Remington of Boston received US patent 82,877 for nickel electroplating, 1868.
• Florence Seibert born 1897: biochemistry of tuberculosis; Garvan Medal, 1942.
• Ernest Walton born 1903: artificial transmutation of elements by bombarding accelerated nuclei (view apparatus and original paper with John Douglas Cockcroft); Nobel Prize (physics), 1951.

• Niels Bohr born 1885: quantized planetary model of the atom; explanation of hydrogen atom spectrum; correspondence principle in quantum theory; Nobel prize (Physics), 1922. Bohrium (Bh, element 107) is named for him.
• Harold Walter Kroto born 1939: fullerenes. Nobel Prize, 1996.
• James Logan Waters born 1925: liquid chromatography; founded Waters Corporation.

• Henri-Louis Le Chatelier born 1850: effects of pressure and temperature on chemical equilibrium (Le Chatelier's principle); chemistry of silicates; mass action in explosives
• Mary Engle Pennington born 1872: her career combined bacteriological chemistry with refrigeration engineering to make her an authority on food preservation.
• Rodney Robert Porter born 1917: biochemist determined four-chain structure of antibodies; Nobel prize (medicine), 1972.
• Jens Christian Skou born 1918: ion-transporting enzyme; Nobel prize, 1997.
• Otto Heinrich Warburg born 1883: respiration and cancer; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1931
• Saul Winstein born 1912: physical organic chemistry; mechanisms of organic reactions

• Hermann Emil Fischer born 1852: synthesis of sugars and their stereochemistry (Fischer projections), uric acid, caffeine, and other contributions to organic chemistry; Nobel Prize, 1902
• Max von Laue born 1879: X-rays and crystal structure (Laue method); Nobel prize (Physics), 1914. View chapters in Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald, describing Laue's discovery and subsequent developments of it, as well as biographical information on Laue.
• Pierre-Joseph Macquer born 1718: research on arsenates and platinum. View his Dictionary of Chemistry (1766, en français) [Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3] or read a couple of its entries or his Elémens de chymie pratique in English translation.
• Peter Mansfield born 1933: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to medical imaging; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2003.

• Carolyn Bertozzi born 1966: bioorthogonal click chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2022
• Henry Cavendish born 1731: discovered hydrogen (H, element 1); recognized water was not an element; investigated nitrogen-containing compounds and atmospheric nitrogen. Read his Experiments on Air.
• Yves Chauvin born 1930: mechanism of metathesis reactions; Nobel Prize, 2005
• Gerhard Ertl born 1936: surface catalysis; Nobel Prize, 2007
• Leroy Hood born 1938: automated DNA sequencer for Human Genome Project. Read his 2002 Kyoto Prize address [in Japanese and English].
• Arthur Lapworth born 1872: organic reaction mechanisms; organic ions.

• Friedrich Bergius born 1884: coal liquefaction; high-pressure chemical reactions; Nobel Prize, 1931
• Fausto de Elhuyar born 1755: co-discoverer of tungsten (W, element 74)
• Harold Johnston born 1920: kinetics and photochemistry; atmospheric chemistry, particularly of ozone.

• Josiah Parsons Cooke born 1827: introduced laboratory instruction to undergraduate chemistry curriculum at Harvard. (View his book on religion and chemistry.)
• Arthur Harden born 1865: enzymes and fermentation; structure of zymase; Nobel Prize, 1929
• Vladimir Kistiakowsky (or Kistiakovskii) born 1865: electrochemistry and thermodynamics
• Ascanio Sobrero born 1812: discovered nitroglycerine.

• General Motors was incorporated, 1916.
• Garrett Augustus Morgan received US Patent 1,113,675 for a gas mask

• Friedrich Kohlrausch born 1840: electrical conductivity; dilution of strong electrolytes
• Alfred Nobel received a Swedish patent for preparing nitroglycerine, in 1863. This has been reported (including here, previously!) as his first patent; it is not. See this partial list at the Nobel Foundation.
• Jacobus van't Hoff presented analogue of ideal gas law for the osmotic pressure of dilute solutions to Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1886

• Malcolm Harold Chisholm born 1945: inorganic and organometallic synthesis.
• First oral contraceptive, a steroid hormone norethindrone, developed by Carl Djerassi and co-workers at Syntex, 1951.
• Evangelista Torricelli born 1608: vacuum, pressure, barometer.

• William Thomas Green Morton demonstrated use of ether as an anesthetic at Massachusetts General Hospital, 1846.
• Henry Clapp Sherman born 1875: research on vitamins; view his 1922 book with Sibyl Laura Smith

• Lev Chugaev [Tschugaev] born 1873: inorganic chemistry of metal complexes; developed complexing agents for analysis
• Unocal incorporated as Union Oil Company of California, 1890.

• A ban of the artificial sweetener cyclamate is announced by the US Food and Drug Administration, 1969.
• Christian Friedrich Schönbein born 1799: discovered ozone and collodion; research on hydrogen peroxide and guncotton. Read more on the discovery and early history of ozone.
• Harvey Washington Wiley born 1844: "Father of Pure Food Law" (1906) in US, and first administrator of it. (Visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.)

• Jacques Brandenberger born 1872: invented a process for making transparent waterproof films (US patent 1,266,766), more popularly known as Cellophane. (This is an early example of a synthetic polymer made from biological feedstock.)
• Samuel Guthrie died 1848 (birth date unknown, 1782): discovered chloroform, percussion explosives.
• Craig Mello born 1960: RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2006.
• Marguerite Perey born 1909: discovered francium (Fr, element 87)

• US administrators of Bilibad Prison in the Philippines changed rice rations from white back to brown rice, 1902. The turnaround in the hitherto increasing incidence of beriberi provides a clue in the discovery of vitamins.
• Vannoccio Biringuccio born 1480: metallurgy and armaments, De la pirotechnia
• James Chadwick born 1891: discovered neutron; Nobel prize (Physics), 1935

• John Dalton read a paper containing his first list of atomic weights to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 1803.
• Hermann Hellriegel born 1831: agricultural chemistry; nitrogen fixation by bacteria in root nodules of legumes.
• Alfred Nobel born 1833: invented dynamite; established Nobel Prizes and Nobel Foundation. Nobelium (No, element 102) is named after him.
• Georg Ernst Stahl born 1660: oxidation and reduction; phlogiston theory; prepared glacial acetic acid. Read excerpts from some of his writings.
• Jean-Pierre Sauvage born 1944: molecular machines, especially linked rings; Nobel Prize, 2016.
• Adolph Strecker born 1822: amino acid synthesis and degradation; sulfite alkylation. See obituary [auf Deutsch] from Berichte.

• Stephen Moulton Babcock born 1843: agricultural chemist, developed Babcock Test for determining the butterfat in milk.
• George Wells Beadle born 1903: chemical genetics; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1958.
• Clinton Joseph Davisson born 1881: wave nature of electrons (Davisson-Germer electron diffraction experiment (see original paper); Nobel Prize (physics), 1937.
• Frank Harold Spedding born 1902: reduction of rare earth elements to metallic state; uranium processing for fission

• Felix Bloch born 1905: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) theory and technology; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1952. (See a collection of references and weblinks on history of NMR and MRI.)
• Gilbert Newton Lewis born 1875: theories of chemical bond and valency; Lewis dot structures; thermodynamics; coined term photon.
• Mole Day (Moment 6:02 on 10/23).

• Pierre-Gilles de Gennes born 1932: order in liquid crystals and polymers; Nobel Prize (physics), 1991.
• Nikolai Aleksandrovich Menshutkin born 1842: kinetics of nucleophilic substitution reactions of amines and quaternary ammonium ions.
• Nylon stockings are first sold, 1939, in Wilmington, Delaware.
• Alonzo Dwight Phillips receives US patent 68 for friction matches (whose heads contained chalk, phosphorus, glue, and brimstone), 1836.
• Hendrik Roozeboom born 1854: applications of the phase rule.
• Roger Clark Wells born 1877: sodium compounds; chemical analyses of radioactive materials; chief chemist of U.S. Geological Survey.

• Edgar Clay Britton born 1891: industrial organic chemistry.
• Marjorie Jean Young Vold born 1913: kinetic and thermodynamic studies of soaps, liquid crystals, and colloidal suspensions; Garvan Medal, 1967.

• Thomas Martin Lowry born 1874: Brønsted-Lowry definition of acids and bases; Historical Introduction to Chemistry
• Trust agreement creating the Petroleum Research Fund signed 1944.

• Pierre-Eugéne-Marcellin Berthelot born 1827: thermochemistry; atomic skeptic.
• Gustav Kirchhoff announces invention of spectroscope, 1859.
• Antoine Lavoisier and wife Marie Paulze survive a munitions explosion, 1788.
• John Edward Lennard-Jones born 1894: interatomic forces (Lennard-Jones potential).

• Christopher Kelk Ingold born 1893: stereoisomers; Cahn-Ingold-Prelog rules; physical organic chemistry; resonance.
• Richard Laurence Millington Synge born 1914: partition chromatography; Nobel Prize, 1952
• Zygmunt von Wróblewski born 1845: liquefaction of gases

• Carl Djerassi born 1923: oral contraceptives (US patent 2,744,122); science in fiction
• Robert Bowie Owens [search for Owens] born 1870: thorium radiation and thorium emanation, later called radon

• Gerhard Domagk born 1895: antibiotic effect of the sulfanilamide drug prontosil; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1939.
• Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp born 1817: atomic and molecular volume.
• D. W. Richards, Jr. born 1895: cardiac catheterization; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1956.
• Max Tishler born 1906: synthetic pharmaceutical chemistry: antibiotics (US patents 2,261,608 and 2,404,199) .

• Adolf von Baeyer born 1835: organic dyes (indigo and triphenylmethane dyes), introduced concept of ring strain (still a useful concept); Nobel Prize, 1905.
• Richard Barry Bernstein born 1923: reaction dynamics using molecular beams.
• Josef Habermann born 1841: protein analysis.
• John Pople born 1925: computational quantum chemistry; Nobel Prize, 1998.
• Joseph Wilson Swan born 1828: carbon process for printing photographs; carbon-filament light bulb.
• Walter Weldon born 1832: industrial chemistry

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