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

November 10-23

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

• Andrés Manuel Del Río born 1764: discovered vanadium (V, element 23), which he called erythronium
• Ernst Otto Fischer born 1918: structure of ferrocene; Nobel Prize, 1973.
• Johnson & Johnson incorporated, 1887.

• Glenn Seaborg announced discovery of americium (Am, element 95) and curium (Cm, 96) on the Quiz Kids radio program, 1945, in response to a question.

• Aleksandr Borodin born 1833: organic chemist; better known today as a composer of operatic (Prince Igor), symphonic, and chamber music
• Jacques Charles born 1746: Charles' law relating temperature and volume of a gas; invented hydrogen balloon.
• John Dalton announced the first example of the law of multiple proportions in 1802 (in a paper on atmospheric gases). (Read Dalton's later words on atomic theory.)
• Antoine Lavoisier described to the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1783 experiments that show water to be a compound, not an element.
• John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) born 1842: codiscoverer of argon (Ar, element 18); Nobel Prize (physics), 1904. (Read an account of the discovery of argon in Rayleigh's own words, and a plea for help along the way.)

• Edward Adelbert Doisy born 1893: research on sex hormones; isolated theelin (estrone) and vitamin K; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1943

• Leo Baekeland born 1863: invented Bakelite plastic (phenol-formaldehyde resins, US patent 942,699) and Velox paper; president of Electrochemical Society
• Frederick Grant Banting born 1891: extraction of insulin and its role in diabetes; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1923. See Banting, Best, et al. paper on pancreatic extracts and diabetes.
• Harry Barkus Gray born 1935: inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry (electronic structure, spectroscopy, mechanisms)
• Auguste Laurent born 1807: discovered anthracene; obtained phthalic acid from naphthalene; identified carbolic acid with phenol; nucleus theory of organic radicals; constructed a saccharimeter

• Albertus Magnus died 1280 (birth date unknown in 1200): discovered arsenic (As, 33); first to use the term affinity in the chemical sense; better known today as a Catholic saint and scholastic philosopher
• Humphry Davy named chlorine (Cl, element 17) and recognized that it did not contain oxygen, 1810. Chlorine had been called oxymuriatic acid.
• Carl Gassner, Jr. received US patent 373,064 for a dry cell battery, 1887
• Friedrich Wilhelm (William) Herschel born 1738: astronomer; discovered infrared radiation.

• Joel Hildebrand born 1881: liquids and solutions; introduced helium (He, element 2) into deep-sea diving

• George Thomas Beilby born 1850: invented process for retorting shale; industrial synthesis of alkaline cyanides
• Nicolas Lemery born 1645: pharmaceutical chemistry; influential and widely translated treatise on chemistry Cours de chymie [en français].

• Patrick Blackett born 1897: development of the cloud chamber method in nuclear physics, with which he documented artificial transmutation of nitrogen by α particles as well as electron-positron interactions; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1948.
• Seth Boyden born 1788: invented a process for manufacturing malleable iron, but did not patent his inventions
• Louis Daguerre born 1789 (or 1787?): photographic pioneer, inventor of the daguerreotype
• George Bogdan Kistiakowsky born 1900: reaction rates, science policy.
• George Wald born 1906: chemistry of vision; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1967.

• Humphry Davy announced the isolation of sodium (Na, element 11) and potassium (K, 19) to the Royal Society, 1807. (Read excerpts of Davy's announcement.)
• Yuan Tseh Lee born 1936: molecular beam study of gas-phase reactions; Nobel Prize, 1986.
• Mikhail Vasil'evich Lomonosov born 1711: suggested law of conservation of mass; suggested that heat was a form of motion; recorded freezing of mercury; opponent of phlogiston theory
• James Batcheller Sumner born 1887: enzymes and proteins; crystallized urease and showed it to be a protein; Nobel Prize, 1946
• Earl Sutherland born 1915: mechanism of hormone action, including role of cyclic AMP; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1971.
• Richard Zare born 1939: laser-induced fluorescence; chemical reaction dynamics.

• Karl von Frisch born 1886: zoologist, chemical and visual perception of fish and bees; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1973.
• Arieh Warshel born 1940: computational biophysical chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2013.

• Vladimir Nikolaievich Ipatieff born 1867: high-pressure catalysis; terpenes; petroleum chemistry (at Universal Oil Products Riverside Laboratory).
• Hieronymus Theodor Richter born 1824: codiscoverer of indium (In, element 49).

• Andrew Fielding Huxley born 1917: co-discoverer of ionic mechanism of neural conductance; grandson of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1963.
• The Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center announced a process to extract water and oxygen from moon soil, 1970. (Learn more about human space flight and about water on the moon.)
• Dmitri Mendeleev's opinion that gallium (Ga, element 31) is likely identical to eka-aluminum is read to the French Academy, 1875. View early versions (1869, 1871) of Mendeleev's periodic table or his retrospective of the periodic law 20 years later.

• Rachel Fuller Brown born 1898: biochemist, co-discoverer of the fungicide nystatin (US patent 2,797,183), the first antibiotic used effectively to treat human fungal infections.
• William G. Kaelin Jr born 1957: oxygen sensing in cells, Nobel Prize (medicine), 2019.
• Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley born 1887: discovered that X-ray emission frequency is related to atomic number of elements. Moseley was killed in World War I.
• Johannes Diderik van der Waals born 1837: equation of state for non-ideal gases (van der Waals equation), intermolecular interactions (van der Waals forces), electrolytic dissociation, capilarity; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1910.

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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