This Week in the History of Chemistry		January	February	March	April
		May	June	July	August
		September	October	November	December

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

September 22-October 5

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

• Michael Faraday born 1791: electrochemist and physicist; electromagnetic induction; Faraday's laws of electrolysis; rotation of plane-polarized light in magnetic field; liquefaction of chlorine; Faraday constant is named after him. See also a letter by Faraday on the condition of the Thames, his lecture on the chemical history of a candle, and his collected papers on electricity (volumes 1, 2, and 3).

• Asima Chatterjee born 1917: natural products chemistry, particularly of vinca alkaloids with anti-convulsive and anti-malarial activity
• John Sheehan born 1915: synthesized penicillin-V (US patent 3,939,151)
• Clifford Shull born 1915: neutron diffraction; Nobel prize (physics), 1994.

• Geoffrey Burbidge born 1925: stellar nucleosynthesis of chemical elements
• Georges Claude born 1870: invented neon light (US patent US 1,189,664).
• Alexander Findlay born 1874: phase rule (including a monograph, The Phase Rule and Its Applications).
• Howard Walter Florey born 1898: isolation and growth of penicillin; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1945.
• Richard Hadley Holm born 1933: metalloproteins, especially iron-sulfur clusters.
• Robert John Kane born 1809: proposed existence of ethyl radical (ethereum) in 1833 (before Liebig).
• Severo Ochoa born 1905: discovery of an enzyme involved in biosynthesis of RNA; artificial RNA; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1959.

• Thomas Hunt Morgan born 1866: modern geneticist; function of chromosomes; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1933

• John Calvin Giddings born 1930: high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) pioneer; field-flow fractionation.
• Henkel founded in 1876.
• Archibald Vivian Hill born 1886: oxygen consumption in muscular action; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1922
• Joseph-Louis Proust born 1754: law of definite proportions (Proust's law); isolated grape sugar (glucose); distinguished oxides from hydroxides
• David Saylor received US patent 119,413 for portland cement, a mixture of magnesium clay with limestone clay, 1871. See kilns from his company.

• Adolf Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe born 1818: synthesized acetic and salicylic acids; theory of radicals; despite his achievements, he is perhaps best known for his vitriolic critiques. Link to Alan Rocke's book on Kolbe and his contemporaries.
• Silent Spring, a scathing critique of pesticides (including DDT), by Rachel Carson was published in 1962.

• First meeting of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, 1908. Their collaboration led, within 10 years, to the discovery of protactinium (Pa, element 91), and 30 years later, to the experimental detection and interpretation of fission.
• Ferdinand-Frédéric-Henri Moissan born 1852: first to isolate fluorine (F, element 9); electrical furnace for preparation of metal and silicon carbides; Nobel Prize, 1906. Read his La fluor et ses composés [Fluorine and its compounds] (en français).
• Solvay Process Company incorporated 1881.

• Enrico Fermi born 1901: neutron-induced nuclear reactions; Nobel prize (Physics), 1938. The group of particles called fermions, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and the element fermium (Fm, element 100) are named after Fermi.
• Peter Dennis Mitchell born 1920: bioenergetics of cells; membrane electrochemistry of mitochondria; Nobel Prize, 1978.

• Antoine-Jerome Balard born 1802: discovered bromine (Br, element 35), hypochlorous acid, and dichlorine monoxide. (View the first sample of bromine isolated by Balard.)
• Johann Deisenhofer born 1943: three-dimensional structure of proteins involved in photosynthesis; Nobel Prize, 1988
• Hans Geiger born 1882: invented Geiger counter for detecting radiation; scattering of alpha particles in lab of Ernest Rutherford. (Read 1909, 1910, and 1913 papers.)
• Jean-Marie Lehn born 1939: three-dimensional stacked-layer polycyclic compounds; Nobel Prize, 1987
• Harry Mork, Arthur Little, and William Walker receive first US patent (709,922) for rayon (a name coined later for this "artificial silk" of cellulose acetate), 1902.
• William Morton uses ether in pulling a tooth of Eben Frost, 1846, the first published use of ether as an anaesthetic.
• Jean Perrin born 1870: research on cathode rays; Brownian movement as it relates to molecular reality; coined term "Avogadro constant"; Nobel Prize (physics), 1926.
• Louis Werner and Isadore Perlman reported isolating first quantity of a compound of curium (Cm, element 96) in 1947 at University of California, Berkeley.

• 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.

Dates are given according to the Gregorian calendar to the extent I could find them. (Note: this applies particularly to 19^th-century Russians.)

Back to the top of the Classic Chemistry site