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July 8-21

• Jason Cardelli reported in Science interstellar abundances of the heaviest elements yet detected in interstellar gas (including thallium and lead), 1994.

• Ford Motor Company incorporated, 1919.

• Kurt Alder born 1902: Diels-Alder cycloaddition reaction, Nobel Prize, 1950 with Otto Diels.

• Samuel Abraham Goudsmit born 1902: electron spin.
• William Robert Grove born 1811: electrochemistry; fuel cells; conservation of energy (On The Correlation of Physical Forces)
• Theodore Harold Maiman born 1927: invented ruby laser (first operable optical laser, US patent 3,353,115; see original paper)

• Claude Bernard born 1813: discovered glycogen; research on digestion.
• Mildred Cohn born 1906: isotopic labeling and isotope effects
• Elias James Corey born 1928: synthetic organic chemist, Nobel Prize, 1990.
• George Eastman born 1854: inventor and manufacturer of Kodak films and cameras. [Link to George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.]
• Satoshi Ōmura born 1935: isolation of avermectin, which led to ivermectin, a successful treatment for river blindness; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2015.
• William Ramsay and Morris Travers discovered xenon (Xe, element 54).

• Stanislao Cannizzaro born 1826: His outline of a course in chemical philosophy was instrumental in gaining acceptance of Avogadro's hypothesis and putting atomic weights on a common basis; Cannizzaro reaction in organic chemistry. [Link to documents and letters in the Cannizzaro archive (in italiano).]

• André Louis Debierne born 1874: radiochemistry, discovered actinium (Ac, element 89). (Link to a birthday card to actinium, in French, written, fancifully, from Debierne's perspective.)
• Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas born 1800: organic chemist (isolated anthracene from coal tar); vapor density method (Dumas method) for determination of atomic and molecular weights; theories of organic radicals and of chemical types. Read his Traité de chimie appliquée aux arts
• Ferdinand II de' Medici born 1610: invented a sealed thermometer; patron of scientists, including Galileo.
• Ei-ichi Negishi born 1935: palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis; Nobel Prize, 2010.
• Joseph Priestley's home (including his laboratory) in Birmingham, England, was destroyed by a rioting mob, 1791. Priestley eventually moved to the US.
• Mary Lura Sherrill born 1888: organic synthesis of antimalarial compounds; Garvan Medal, 1947. (Link to a review of antimalarial compounds.)
• Geoffrey Wilkinson born 1921: inorganic chemistry (sandwich compounds, such as ferrocene; complex hydrides, homogeneous catalysis); Nobel Prize, 1973

• William Baker born 1915: molecular structure; solid state materials; physical properties of polymers
• Max Bodenstein born 1871: chemical kinetics, including chain reactions. (View some data from his investigations of the kinetics and equilibrium of the reaction between hydrogen and iodine.)
• Albert Ghiorso born 1915: co-discoverer of transuranic elements americium (Am, element 95), curium (Cm, 96), berkelium (Bk, 97), californium (Cf, 98), einsteinium (Es, 99), fermium (Fm, 100), mendelevium (Md, 101), nobelium (No, 102), lawrencium (Lr, 103), rutherfordium (Rf, 104), dubnium (Db, 105; hahnium was proposed name), and seaborgium (Sg, 106).
• Robert Bruce Merrifield born 1921: solid-phase peptide synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1984
• The Royal Society (UK), one of the oldest scientific societies, was granted a charter by Charles II, 1662. (View page images of its Proceedings at the National Library of France--yes, France).

• Atomic bomb test, Trinity Site, Alamogordo Air Force Base, 1945.
• Joseph Goldberger born 1874: physician in the US public health service; linked pellagra to a dietary deficiency. See part of his report.
• Irwin Rose born 1926: protein chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2004, "for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation."
• Alfred Stock born 1876: boron hydrides, mercury poisoning.

• Frederick Augustus Abel born 1827: co-inventor of cordite; Abel tester for petroleum flash point

• Roald Hoffmann born 1937: molecular orbital theory; Woodward-Hoffmann rules (conservation of orbital symmetry); Nobel Prize, 1981.
• Robert Hooke born 1635: best known as a physicist for his work on elasticity and a biologist for microscopy (Micrographia), Hooke also studied gases.
• Hendrik Antoon Lorentz born 1853: structure of matter and optical properties; Zeeman effect; Nobel prize (Physics) 1902 with Zeeman.
• Hartmut Michel born 1948: structure of photosynthetic proteins; Nobel Prize, 1988.
• Frederick Dominic Rossini born 1899: numerical reference data in thermodynamics.

• Eleuthère du Pont began construction of gunpowder factory (precursor of DuPont), 1802.
• Allene Jeanes born 1906: food chemist, first woman to win USDA Distinguished Service Award, 1953.
• Rosalyn Sussman Yalow born 1921: developed radioimmunoassay; Nobel Prize (Medicine) 1977.

• Gerd Binnig born 1947: scanning tunneling microscope; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1986.
• Tadeus Reichstein born 1897: hormones of the adrenal cortex; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1950.

• Georg Brandt born 1694: discovered cobalt (Co, element 27).
• Rudolph Arthur Marcus born 1923: theory of electron transfer reactions; Nobel prize, 1992. Marcus is the M of RRKM theory; read a retrospective paper by Marcus.
• Henri-Victor Regnault born 1810: thermometry and other thermal phenomena.

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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