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See also This Month in the History of the Periodic Table (with links to a searchable online map).

May 5-18

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

• John William Draper born 1811: first president of American Chemical Society; photographic pioneer; improved on Daguerre's process.
• Albert Ghiorso and co-workers announced the discovery of nobelium (No, element 102) by (left to right) Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, John R. Walton and (absent) Glenn Seaborg at the Berkeley Radiation Lab (later named Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), 1958.
• Proctor and Gamble incorporated, 1905.
• Arthur Leonard Schawlow born 1921: lasers and non-linear optical spectroscopy; Nobel prize (physics), 1981.

• Henry Edward Armstrong born 1848: chemistry of aromatic compounds (including dyestuffs); science education; solutions (opposed to Arrhenius' and Ostwald's dissociation theories).
• Johann Joachim Becher born 1635: phlogiston theory.
• Julius Berend Cohen born 1859: laws of aromatic substitution; optical activity.
• Victor Grignard born 1871: developed magnesium-based reagent (Grignard reagent) used in organic synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1912.
• Paul Christian Lauterbur born 1926: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to medical imaging; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2003.
• Richard Moore born 1871: helium (He) for balloons and dirigibles; supervised production of radium salts in US.
• Jean Senebier born 1742: showed that green plants convert "fixed air" (carbon dioxide) to "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen)--the process now known as photosynthesis.

• Sidney Altman born 1939: proved that ribonucleic acid (RNA) can act as a catalyst in the cell; Nobel Prize, 1989.
• Arda Alden Green born 1899: isolation of phosphorylase, serotonin; bioluminescence (luciferase, luciferin); Garvan Medal, 1958
• Edwin Land born 1909: invented a light polarizing material (Polaroid) and an instant-developing photographic system (Polaroid Land camera, using US patent 2,543,181); founded Polaroid company.

• Bohuslav Brauner born 1855: chemistry of tellurium and the rare earths; predicted the existence of promethium (Pm, element 61).
• H. Robert Horvitz born 1947: genetics of organ development and cell death; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2002.
• Antoine Lavoisier was sentenced to death by the French Revolutionary Tribunal and executed by guillotine, 1794.
• Nevil Vincent Sidgwick born 1873: molecular structure and theory of valency.

• Manfred Eigen born 1927: chemical kinetics by relaxation techniques; Nobel Prize, 1967.
• Henry Gilman born 1893: organometallic chemistry.
• James Colquhoun Irvine born 1877: sugar chemistry.
• Michael Levitt born 1947: computational structural biology; Nobel Prize, 2013.
• Edward Weston born 1850: improved nickel plating and electrical instruments.

• Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff announced the discovery of cesium (Cs, element 55), 1860.
• Edward Frankland provides a clear statement of the concept later known as chemical valence (in a paper on organometallic compounds), 1852.
• Gaspard Monge born 1746: liquefaction of sulfur dioxide; metric system; best known as a mathematician for work on differential geometry.
• Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin born 1900 (with surname Payne): stellar spectroscopy; established that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium while at Harvard College Observatory.
• François-Marie Raoult born 1830: properties of solutions; discovered that vapor pressure in many solutions is proportional to the number of molecules per unit volume in the solution (Raoult's law); freezing-point depression; vapor pressure lowering.
• Rudolf Schoenheimer born 1898: biochemist: cholesterol and heart disease; isotopic tagging of biochemical molecules.

• Koji Nakanishi born 1925: structural determination of natural products.
• Donald Othmer born 1904: chemical engineer; co-founder and editor of Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology.

• William Francis Giauque born 1895: thermodynamics, particularly at very low temperatures; Nobel Prize, 1949.
• Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin born 1910: X-ray determination of penicillin and Vitamin B₁₂ crystal structure; Nobel Prize, 1964.
• Justus Liebig born 1803: "Father of agricultural chemistry"; quantitative organic analysis; Liebig condenser; distinguished fats, protins, and carbohydrates in foods. (View Liebig's monographs Familiar Letters on Chemistry, Animal Chemistry, and Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology.)
• First successful use of streptomycin on human beings, 1945.

• Marie Sklodowska Curie was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne, 1906 (the first woman professor there).
• Friedrich Karl Johannes Thiele born 1865: organic chemistry; unsaturated and nitrogenous compounds (particularly derivatives of hydrazine and guanidine); Thiele tube.

• George Fownes born 1815: organic and analytical chemistry; author of Elementary Chemistry: Theoretical and Practical, which went through many editions long after Fownes' death.
• Edward Jenner inoculated a boy with cowpox virus (smallpox vaccine), 1796. (This is an important step in the history of immunization but not the first one; see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu importing a practice from the Ottoman Empire to England.)
• Miguel Ondetti born 1930: synthesis and application of polypeptides to pharmaceuticals. bold red
• Peter J. Ratcliffe born 1954: oxygen sensing in cells; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2019.
• Mikhail Tswett born 1872: invention of chromatography; plant pigments such as chlorophylls and carotenoids.

• Pierre Curie born 1859: piezoelectricity; magnetism (Curie temperature); codiscoverer with wife Marie of polonium (Po, element 84) and radium (Ra, 88); Nobel Prize (Physics), 1903 with Marie.
• William Hume-Rothery born 1899: metallurgy: alloys and intermetallic compounds.

• Adolf Ossian Aschan born 1860: alicyclic organic compounds (view his book, auf Deutsch); isoprene polymerization.
• Johannes Georg Bednorz born 1950: high-temperature superconducting materials; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1987.
• Theodore Harold Maiman first produced laser light (ruby laser, US patent 3,353,115), 1960.
• Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin born 1763: discovered chromium (Cr, element 24) and beryllium (Be, 4).

• Odd Hassel born 1897: conformational analysis; Nobel Prize, 1969
• Ferenc Krausz born 1962; electron dynamics via attosecond pulses of electromagnetic radiation, Nobel Prize (Physics), 2023.
• Joseph Norman Lockyer born 1836: codiscovered spectroscopic line of helium (He, element 2) in the sun; founder and editor of the journal Nature.

• Dow Chemical incorporated, 1897.
• Vincent Du Vigneaud born 1901: biochemistry of sulfur compounds; identified biotin; synthesized hormones oxytocin and vasopressin; Nobel Prize, 1955.
• Robley Evans born 1907: nuclear medicine, uptake of radioisotopes in the body.
• Bernard (Ben) Feringa born 1951: molecular machines, also known as molecular nanoscience; Nobel Prize, 2016.
• Thomas Midgley, Jr., born 1889: introduced tetraethyllead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline (see US patent 1,573,846); invention of chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants (see US patent 1,833,847), CCl₂F₂ and CCl₃F.

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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