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).

July 14-27

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

• André Louis Debierne born 1874: radiochemistry, discovered actinium (Ac, element 89). (Link to a birthday card to actinium, en français, 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 (en français)
• 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 Philosophical Transactions.)

• 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
• Eunice Foote born (as Eunice Newton) 1819: warming effects of carbon dioxide; signed Seneca Falls declaration of sentiments. See a discussion of Foote's unrecognized work and that of John Tyndall conducted a few years later.

• 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 Pieter Zeeman.
• Hartmut Michel born 1948: structure of photosynthetic reaction center; 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.
• Richard Henderson born 1945: cryo-electron microscopy of biomolecules; Nobel Prize, 2017
• 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.

• Selman Abraham Waksman born 1888: discovery of antitubercular agent streptomycin with Albert Schatz; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1952. View the streptomycin patent (US 2,449,866).

• Pierre Agostini born 1941; electron dynamics via attosecond pulses of electromagnetic radiation, Nobel Prize (Physics), 2023.
• Emma Perry Carr born 1880: ultraviolet spectra of hydrocarbons; International Critical Tables; first recipient of ACS Garvan Medal, 1937.
• Icie Macy Hoobler born 1892: biochemistry related to nutrition of children, infants, and pregnant women
• Vladimir Prelog born 1906: organic stereochemistry, including Cahn-Ingold-Prelog rules for nomenclature; Nobel prize, 1975.

• William de Wiveleslie Abney born 1843: color photography and its chemistry.
• Alice Augusta Ball born 1892: one of the first African American women to earn an advanced degree in chemistry and to publish in JACS, Ball developed an injectable treatment for leprosy based on esterifying chaulmoogra oil in 1915. Ball died very young, in 1916.

• Frances Arnold born 1956: directed evolution of enzymes; Nobel Prize, 2018
• Colgate-Palmolive incorporated 1923
• Rosalind Franklin born 1920: X-ray crystallography of DNA, including her famous "photograph 51"; view Franklin typescript on structure of sodium thymonucleate.
• John B. Goodenough born 1922: lithium ion batteries; Nobel Prize, 2019
• Andreas Libavius died 1616 (birth date unknown in 1540): author of Alchemia (or Alchymia) (perhaps first chemical textbook), fuming liquor of Libavius, ammonium sulfate, chemical analysis.

• Isaac Babbitt born 1799: invented Babbitt metal for bearings (an alloy of tin, antimony, and copper). No relation to Sinclair Lewis's George Babbitt
• A marriage of minds: Pierre Curie and Marja Sklodowska wed, 1895.
• James Lovelock born 1919: invented electron capture detector (US patent 3046396); first detected chlorofluorocarbons in atmosphere; best known for Gaia hypothesis
• Paul Walden born 1863: electrical conductivity and electrolytic dissociation; Walden inversion.

• Bertram Borden Boltwood born 1870: early radioactivity and radiochemistry research.
• Friedrich Dorn born 1848: discovered radon (Rn, element 86), an "emanation of radium" in 1900. (Note that Ernest Rutherford discovered an "emanation of thorium" (later recognized as an isotope of radon) in the same year.)
• Hans Fischer born 1881: research on hemin, chlorophyll, porphyrins, and related compounds; Nobel prize, 1930

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