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

May 25-June 7

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

• First fluid bed reactor began commercial operation, 1942, in Baton Rouge, LA.
• Stuart Perry of New York city obtains US patent 3597 for a gas engine, 1844. The engine used turpentine gases as fuels; patent covered both air-cooled and water-cooled versions.
• Pieter Zeeman born 1865: splitting of spectral lines by magnetic fields (Zeeman effect); Nobel Prize (physics), 1902

• Helen Marie Dyer born 1895: nutrition: dietary substitutes and effects of nutrition on gastric function

• John Bailar, Jr., born 1904: discovered optical inversion and explained stereospecificity in complex inorganic reactions; coordination chemistry.
• Rachel Carson born 1907: author of Silent Spring (1962), a scathing critique of pesticides (including DDT).
• John Douglas Cockcroft born 1897: artificial transmutation of elements by bombarding nuclei with Ernest Walton (view apparatus); Nobel Prize (physics), 1951, with Walton.
• Theodor Curtius born 1857: chemistry of hydrazines and azides; Curtius rearrangement.
• Kasimir Fajans born 1887: radioactive displacement law; introduced concept of heat of hydration of gaseous ions.
• Mary Fieser born 1909: natural product chemistry; coauthor of Reagents for Organic Synthesis
• Robert Finnigan born 1927: quadrupole mass spectrometer.
• Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder born 1911: structure and properties of gases and liquids; statistical mechanics; flame propagation; quantum mechanics; chemical kinetics.
• Lars Fredrick Nilson born 1840: discovered scandium (Sc, element 21).

• First pure food and drug legislation at the state level passed in New York, 1881 ("an act to prevent the adulteration of food or drugs").

• Antoine Bussy born 1794: isolated magnesium (Mg, element 12).

• Julius Axelrod born 1912: catecholamines; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1970.
• John Herapath born 1790: kinetic theory of gases
• Henry Aaron Hill born 1915: first African-American president of American Chemical Society.
• Brian Kobilka born 1955: G-protein-coupled receptors; Nobel Prize, 2012.

• Louis Ignarro born 1941: role of nitric oxide signaling in cardiovacular system; Nobel (medicine), 1998.
• Austin McDowell Patterson born 1876: editor of Chemical Abstracts; contributions to chemical information and chemical nomenclature; co-author of A Guide to the Literature of Chemistry (1927).
• William Ramsay and Morris William Travers detected krypton (Kr, element 36), 1898.
• Betty Sullivan born 1902: wheat biochemistry with applications to baking and flour; Garvan Medal, 1952.

• Sadi Carnot born 1796: investigated heat engines and laid foundations (Carnot cycle) for Second Law of Thermodynamics. Read his Reflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu (en français) or an English translation, Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat
• William Standish Knowles born 1917: chiral catalysis of hydrogenation reactions; Nobel Prize.

• Edward Elgar born 1857: composer and amateur chemist [Thanks to Leopold May for drawing this to my attention.]
• Clair Patterson born 1922: stable-isotope geochemistry; age of the earth; lead (Pb, element 82) in the environment
• Nils Gabriel Sefström born 1787: rediscovered vanadium (V, element 23).

• Werner Arber born 1929: restriction enzymes; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1978. Read an interview of Arber.
• Otto Loewi born 1873: chemical transmission of nerve impulses; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1936.
• Robert Burns Woodward synthesized chlorophyll, 1960.

• Jean Antoine Chaptal born 1756: introduced name "nitrogen"; viticulture; dyeing; manufacture of sulfuric acid.
• Robert Furchgott born 1916: role of nitric oxide signaling in cardiovacular system; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1998.
• Jacob Volhard born 1834: organic synthesis, including creatine, brominated organic acids, and thiophene compounds.
• Heinrich Otto Wieland born 1877: organic chemistry (including nitrogenous organic radicals) and biochemistry (including sterols and bile acids); Nobel Prize, 1927.

• Johan Gadolin born 1760: discovered yttrium (Y, element 39); gadolinium (Gd, 64) was named after gadolinite, which was named after him.
• William Erastus Upjohn born 1853: inventor of dissolvable pill; founder of Upjohn Pill and Granule Company (later the Upjohn Company, merged with Pharmacia in 1995 and purchased by Pfizer in 2002).

• Benjamin Brodie gave a lecture to the Chemical Society on the "Chemical Calculus", an attempt at a non-atomic theory of chemical composition, 1867.
• Edwin Gerhard Krebs born 1918: protein phosphorylation as biological regulatory mechanism; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1992.
• Heinrich Rohrer born 1933: scanning tunneling microscope; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1986. (See summary of 1981-1986 articles on scanning tunneling microscope.)
• Richard Smalley born 1943: fullerenes; Nobel Prize, 1996.

• James Young Simpson born 1811: obsterician and pioneer in anesthesia; first used chloroform; introduced use of ether in Britain.
• Robert Sanderson Mulliken born 1896: molecular orbital method of electronic structure; Nobel Prize, 1966.

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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