This Week in the History of Chemistry		January	February	March	April
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See also This Month in the History of the Periodic Table (with links to a searchable online map).

March 23-April 5

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

• Neil Bartlett prepared the first noble gas compound, XePtF₆, 1962. [Thanks to Matt Morello for bringing this to my attention.]
• Daniel Bovet born 1907: pharmacologist; antihistamines (discovered pyrilamine); curare; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1957.
• Cold fusion announced at University of Utah press conference, 1989. Paper by Martin Fleischmann & Stanley Pons appeared very shortly thereafter. The announcement caused a great stir, then quickly faded (but not entirely).
• William Crookes in 1895 identified a new gas isolated by William Ramsay as helium (He, element 2, which had previously been observed as a line in the solar spectrum some 27 years earlier.)
• Charles Lathrop Parsons born 1867: research on beryllium (Be, element 4).
• Hermann Staudinger born 1881: chemistry of macromolecules; Nobel Prize, 1953.

• Georgius Agricola (also known as Georg Bauer) born 1494: "Father of Mineralogy"; described mining and metallurgy in De Re Metallica (1556, Read English translation).
• William Brownrigg born 1711: pneumatic trough for collection of gases; description of platinum (Pt, element 78).
• Adolf Frederick Johann Butenandt born 1903: research on sex hormones including estrone, androsterone, and progesterone; Nobel Prize, 1939, declined on instructions of Nazi government (received award in 1949).
• Peter Debye born 1884: dipole moment determinations (unit named after him); powder method of X-ray diffraction (Debye-Scherrer method; view reminiscences by Scherrer); electrolyte solutions (Debye-Hückel theory); intermolecular forces; Nobel Prize, 1936. (Years after his death, questions were raised over Debye's actions under Nazi rule, subsequent investigations suggest a more complex situation than initially appeared.)
• Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef, 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into the waters of Prince William Sound, Alaska.
• William Frear born 1860: food and agricultural chemistry: beet sugar, cereals, culture of tobacco, soils, fertilizers.
• John Cowdery Kendrew born 1917: used X-ray diffraction to determine structure of myoglobin. (See 1958 Nature paper.) Nobel Prize, 1962

• Dorothea Juliana Wallich born on an unknown date in 1657: This chymist reported thermochromic properties of cobalt compounds; view her Schlüssel zu dem Cabinet der geheimen Schatz-Cammer der Natur [auf Deutsch]

• Christian Anfinsen born 1916: relationship of protein structure (especially ribonuclease) to biological function; Nobel Prize, 1972.
• Ferdinand Brickwedde born 1903: codiscoverer of deuterium.
• Alexander Crum Brown born 1838: modern structural formulae; rules for substitution in benzene derivatives; organosulfur compounds; theory of isomerism.
• James Bryant Conant born 1893: research on free radicals, hemoglobin, and chlorophylls; president of Harvard University; science and education policy; high commissioner and US Ambassador to West Germany.
• Joseph Francisco born 1955: atmospheric chemistry; president of the American Chemical Society.
• Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) born 1753: invented simple photometer; thermodynamics, including heat as motion (cannon boring experiment) and second law of thermodynamics; improvements in cooking and heating systems and animal breeding.
• Hermann Wilhelm Vogel born 1834: spectroscopic photography; designed a photometer; invented orthochromatic photographic plate.

• Nikolai Yakovlevich Demjanov born 1861: decomposition of aliphatic diazonium ions, Demjanov-Tiffeneau rearrangement.
• Johann Wilhelm Hittorf born 1824: electrolysis of salt solutions; transport numbers; ion migration; electrical discharges in gases.
• Polyethylene discovered by Reginald Gibson and Eric Fawcett, 1933.
• Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen born 1845: discovered X-rays; research in heat capacity and heat conduction of crystals; initial Nobel Prize in physics, 1901. Read an account of the discovery of X-rays from Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald.
• John Sulston born 1942: genetics of organ development and cell death; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2002.
• Otto Wallach born 1847: terpenes and essential oils; Nobel Prize, 1910.

• Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne born 1837: coined the term enzyme (or rather Enzym in German).
• Glenn Seaborg and coworkers showed that plutonium-239 undergoes slow-neutron fission in 1941. Production of a plutonium bomb subsequently became a goal of the Manhattan Project.
• Michael Young born 1949: molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythm; Nobel Prize, 2017

• Carl Friedrich Accum born 1769: industrial chemist; helped found the coal gas industry; read his book on food adulteration.
• Julius Konrad Bredt born 1855: first described correct structure of camphor; Bredt's rule for bicyclic compounds.
• Aleksei Yevgen'evich Chichibabin born 1871: nucleophilic alkylation; amination of pyridines (Chichibabin reaction); synthesis of substituted pyridines (Chichibabin-Baeyer reaction).
• Herrick Lee Johnston born 1898: cryogenics; isotopes of hydrogen, oxygen.
• Madeleine Joullié born 1927: organic synthesis (tilorone, furanomycin, cyclopeptide alkaloids and cyclodepsipeptides); Garvan Medal, 1978.
• Donald Dexter Van Slyke born 1883: clinical chemistry.
• John Robert Vane born 1927: identification of prostacyclin (epoprostenol), a natural blood-clotting inhibitor; aspirin's pain relief mechanism; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1982.

• Alma LeVant Hayden born 1927: analytical chemistry at FDA; one of the first African American women to work as a scientist at a federal agency.
• Crawford Williamson Long first used ether as an anesthetic in 1842 (commemorated as "Doctors' Day").

• William Lawrence Bragg born 1890: X-ray crystallography (Bragg's law); Nobel Prize (physics), 1915, with father (William Henry Bragg). Read reminiscences by the younger Bragg and a biography of the elder from Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald.
• Robert Bunsen born 1811: co-inventor of spectroscope and actinometer; co-discoverer of cesium (Cs, element 55) and rubidium (Rb, 37); Bunsen burner, filter pump, a galvanic battery.
• Thomas Clark born 1801: water purification; introduced calcium hydroxide for softening water.
• Archibald Scott Couper born 1831: organic structural theory and notation; introduced bond lines in organic structure.
• William Jackson Pope born 1870: optical activity of asymmetric heteroatoms; mustard gas.
• Otto Nikolaus Witt born 1853: structure of dye compounds.

• Claude Cohen-Tannoudji born 1933: cooling of atoms by interactions with laser light; Nobel Prize (physics), 1997.
• William Vernon Harcourt died 1871 (birth date unknown in June 1789): founder of British Association for the Advancement of Science (formerly known as the BA, but now rebranded as the British Science Association); chemical analysis, effect of heat on inorganic substances.
• G. N. Lewis's article, "The Atom and the Molecule," containing Lewis dot structures is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1916 (April issue, nominal publication date April 1).
• Sergei Nikolaevich Reformatskii (Reformatsky) born 1860: synthesis of organozinc halides (Reformatsky reaction).
• Julian Stone reported in Applied Physics Letters that a new quartz fiber filled with tetrachloroethylene may be able to carry light, 1972.
• Richard Adolf Zsigmondy born 1865: explained heterogeneous nature of colloidal suspensions; introduced the ultramicroscope for study of colloids; Nobel Prize, 1925. View Zsigmondy's book Colloids and the Ultramicroscope.

• Carl Alsberg born 1877: food chemistry; second chief administrator of US Federal Food and Drug Law.
• Francis Crick and James Dewey Watson mailed brief article on the double-helix structure of DNA to Nature in 1953; view a typescript of the article.
• Charles Martin Hall obtains US patent 400,766 for an electrolytic process for producing aluminum in 1886. Read Norman Craig's article on Hall's aluminum patents.

• First meeting of the Electrochemical Society of America (now simply the Electrochemical Society) 1902, at the Manufacturers' Club, Philadelphia. Read more on the history of the Society. [Thanks to Lee May for bringing this to my attention.]

• Otto Folin born 1867: clinical chemistry; Folin-Wu reagent for glucose analysis.
• Johan Peter Klason born 1848: lignin chemistry.
• Raoul Pierre Pictet born 1846: liquefaction of oxygen.
• Ira Remsen was awarded the first Priestley Medal in 1923.
• Synthesis of vitamin B₆ announced by Merck, Sharp & Dohme in 1939.

• Richard Chenevix born 1774: mineralogist; chemistry of platinum (Pt, element 78) and palladium (Pd, 46).
• Norman Davidson born 1916: ion channels and neurotransmitters.
• Ida Freund born 1863 (or April 15): chemical education and history of chemistry; The Study of Chemical Composition: An Account of Its Method and Historical Development.
• Joseph Lister born 1827: antiseptics such as carbolic acid (phenol); read part of his report.

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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