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

September 17-30

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

• Peter Cooper Hewitt obtains US patent 682,695 for mercury vapor lamp, 1901

• Edwin Mattison McMillan born 1907: transuranium elements; co-discoverer of neptunium (Np, element 93) and plutonium (Pu, 94); Nobel Prize, 1951
• Marinus Los born 1933: imidazolinones as low-toxicity herbicides

• First underground nuclear test explosion, 1957. Previous US nuclear weapons tests were all above ground.

• James Dewar born 1842: liquefied hydrogen; invented vacuum flask (Dewar flask); phosphorescence at low temperatures; co-developer of cordite
• Organization, in Philadelphia, of American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848.

• Louis-Paul Cailletet born 1832: liquefaction of gases
• Louis Pasteur sampled pure air of French Alps, 1860. His experiments comparing this air to city air contribute to germ theory of disease and demise of the theory of spontaneous generation.

• Michael Faraday born 1791: electrochemist and physicist; electromagnetic induction; Faraday's laws of electrolysis; rotation of plane-polarized light in magnetic field; liquefaction of chlorine; Faraday constant is named after him. See also a letter by Faraday on the condition of the Thames, his lecture on the chemical history of a candle, and his collected papers on electricity (volumes 1, 2, and 3).

• Asima Chatterjee born 1917: natural products chemistry, particularly of vinca alkaloids with anti-convulsive and anti-malarial activity
• John Sheehan born 1915: synthesized penicillin-V (US patent 3,939,151)
• Clifford Shull born 1915: neutron diffraction; Nobel prize (physics), 1994.

• Geoffrey Burbidge born 1925: stellar nucleosynthesis of chemical elements
• Georges Claude born 1870: invented neon light (US patent US 1,189,664).
• Alexander Findlay born 1874: phase rule (including a monograph, The Phase Rule and Its Applications).
• Howard Walter Florey born 1898: isolation and growth of penicillin; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1945.
• Richard Hadley Holm born 1933: metalloproteins, especially iron-sulfur clusters.
• Robert John Kane born 1809: proposed existence of ethyl radical (ethereum) in 1833 (before Liebig).
• Severo Ochoa born 1905: discovery of an enzyme involved in biosynthesis of RNA; artificial RNA; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1959.

• Thomas Hunt Morgan born 1866: modern geneticist; function of chromosomes; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1933

• John Calvin Giddings born 1930: high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) pioneer; field-flow fractionation.
• Henkel founded in 1876.
• Archibald Vivian Hill born 1886: oxygen consumption in muscular action; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1922
• Joseph-Louis Proust born 1754: law of definite proportions (Proust's law); isolated grape sugar (glucose); distinguished oxides from hydroxides
• David Saylor received US patent 119,413 for portland cement, a mixture of magnesium clay with limestone clay, 1871. See kilns from his company.

• Adolf Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe born 1818: synthesized acetic and salicylic acids; theory of radicals; despite his achievements, he is perhaps best known for his vitriolic critiques. Link to Alan Rocke's book on Kolbe and his contemporaries.
• Silent Spring, a scathing critique of pesticides (including DDT), by Rachel Carson was published in 1962.

• First meeting of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn, 1908. Their collaboration led, within 10 years, to the discovery of protactinium (Pa, element 91), and 30 years later, to the experimental detection and interpretation of fission.
• Ferdinand-Frédéric-Henri Moissan born 1852: first to isolate fluorine (F, element 9); electrical furnace for preparation of metal and silicon carbides; Nobel Prize, 1906. Read his La fluor et ses composés [Fluorine and its compounds] (en français).
• Solvay Process Company incorporated 1881.

• Enrico Fermi born 1901: neutron-induced nuclear reactions; Nobel prize (Physics), 1938. The group of particles called fermions, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and the element fermium (Fm, element 100) are named after Fermi.
• Peter Dennis Mitchell born 1920: bioenergetics of cells; membrane electrochemistry of mitochondria; Nobel Prize, 1978.

• Antoine-Jerome Balard born 1802: discovered bromine (Br, element 35), hypochlorous acid, and dichlorine monoxide. (View the first sample of bromine isolated by Balard.)
• Johann Deisenhofer born 1943: three-dimensional structure of proteins involved in photosynthesis; Nobel Prize, 1988
• Hans Geiger born 1882: invented Geiger counter for detecting radiation; scattering of alpha particles in lab of Ernest Rutherford. (Read 1909, 1910, and 1913 papers.)
• Jean-Marie Lehn born 1939: three-dimensional stacked-layer polycyclic compounds; Nobel Prize, 1987
• Harry Mork, Arthur Little, and William Walker receive first US patent (709,922) for rayon (a name coined later for this "artificial silk" of cellulose acetate), 1902.
• William Morton uses ether in pulling a tooth of Eben Frost, 1846, the first published use of ether as an anaesthetic.
• Jean Perrin born 1870: research on cathode rays; Brownian movement as it relates to molecular reality; coined term "Avogadro constant"; Nobel Prize (physics), 1926.
• Louis Werner and Isadore Perlman reported isolating first quantity of a compound of curium (Cm, element 96) in 1947 at University of California, Berkeley.

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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