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

June 23-July 6

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

• Etienne-Louis Malus born 1775: double refraction (birefringence).

• Eleuthère du Pont born 1771: gunpowder manufacturer; founded DuPont, 1802
• Fred Hoyle born 1915: stellar nucleosynthesis of chemical elements; coined term "big bang" (derisively)
• Frederick George Keyes born 1885: thermodynamic properties of matter; kinetic theory; application of thermodynamics to equilibria.
• William Moerner born 1953: very high-resolution fluorescence microscopy; Nobel Prize, 2014.
• Johannes Wislicenus born 1835: proposed idea of geometric isomers; acetoacetic ester synthesis.

• Herbert Brereton Baker born 1862: effect of water on chemical change; desiccating and poison gases.
• Marie Curie (née Manya Sklodowska) presented doctoral thesis to Paris faculty of science, 1903. The thesis summarized the work for which she would share the Nobel prize that same year. (See English translation of dissertation.)
• Walther Hermann Nernst born 1864: third law of thermodynamics; electrochemistry (Nernst equation); Nobel Prize, 1920.
• William Howard Stein born 1911: enzyme chemistry; Nobel Prize, 1972.

• Henri Moissan electrolyzed a solution of KHF₂ in anhydrous HF to isolate fluorine (F, element 9), 1886.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald converted ammonia to nitric acid with a platinum catalyst, 1907.
• Roy Plunkett born 1910: invention and characterization of polytetrafluoroethylene, better known as Teflon® (US patent 2,230,654)
• James Smithson died 1829 (birth date unknown c.1765): analysis of zinc ores; his bequest started the Smithsonian Institution.
• William Thomson (Baron Kelvin of Largs) born 1824: theory and practice of thermodynamics, including a formulation of the second law; absolute temperature (Kelvin) scale.

• Arthur Clay Cope born 1909: ring compounds; synthetic organic chemistry (Cope rearrangement)
• Abraham Gesner obtained US patents 11,203, 11,204, and 11,205 on a process for obtaining kerosene by distillation, 1854.

• William Campbell born 1930: isolation of avermectin, which led to ivermectin, a successful treatment for river blindness; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2015.
• Emil Richard Erlenmeyer born 1825: conical flask (Erlenmeyer flask); organic synthesis (including tyrosine and guanidine).
• Jenny Pickworth Glusker born 1931: crystallography; structural studies of carcinogenisis and mutagenisis
• Maria Goeppert-Mayer born 1906: nucleus shell structure; Nobel Prize (physics), 1963.
• Jane Haldimand Marcet died 1858 (birth date unknown in 1769): wrote Conversations on Chemistry (popular chemistry text). Link to the text of the book or an article about it.
• Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland paper proposing that chlorofluorocarbons deplete stratospheric ozone was published, 1974.
• F. Sherwood Rowland born 1927: atmospheric chemistry, particularly of ozone layer; Nobel Prize, 1995.

• Peter Waage born 1833: formulated law of mass action (with brother-in-law Cato Guldberg)

• John Townsend Baker born 1860: founded J. T. Baker chemical company, 1904.
• Paul Berg born 1926: recombinant DNA; Nobel Prize, 1980.
• Joseph Caventou born 1795: worked with Pierre-Joseph Pelletier; isolated strychnine, chlorophyll, quinine, and caffeine
• Humphry Davy announced the isolation of barium (Ba, element 56), calcium (Ca, 20), "magnium" (magnesium, Mg, 12), and strontium (Sr, 38) to the Royal Society, 1808. He also announced the isolation of boron (B, element 5), nine days after Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis Thénard made a similar announcement in France. (Read Davy's paper.)
• William Higgins died 1825 (uncertain; birth date unknown in 1762 or 1763): atomic notions of chemical combination; advocate of antiphlogistic theory of combustion.
• Pure Food and Drug Act signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, 1906.
• Valence bond paper on H₂ by Walter Heitler and Fritz London received at Zeitschrift für Physik, 1927.

• Gerald Maurice Edelman born 1929: structure of antibodies; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1972.
• Gladys Anderson Emerson born 1903: isolation and function of vitamin E (tocopherol); vitamin B deficiencies.
• Alfred Goodman Gilman born 1941: G-proteins and cellular signal transduction; Nobel prize (medicine), 1994.
• Franz Joseph Müller von Reichenstein born 1740 (or Oct. 4, 1742): discovered tellurium (Te, element 52).

• Richard Axel born 1946: research on olfaction, one of the "chemical senses;" Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2004.
• Elkan Rodgers Blout born 1919: protein conformation.
• William Henry Bragg born 1862: X-ray crystallography (Bragg's law); Nobel Prize (Physics), 1915 with son William Lawrence. Read reminiscences by the younger Bragg and a biography of the elder from Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald.
• Harriet Brooks born 1876: radioactivity, particularly radon (element, 86) as an emanation from radium.
• Fritz Haber demonstrated nitrogen fixation process (Haber process for synthetic ammonia) to Badische Aniline und Soda-Fabrik (BASF), 1909.
• Albert Ladenburg born 1842: synthesis of pyridine, piperidine, and other compounds
• Jean'ne Marie Shreeve born 1933: synthetic fluorine chemistry, particularly fluorinated compounds of nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus; Garvan Medal, 1972.
• Fritz Ullmann born 1872: Ullmann's Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry.
• Paul Weisz born 1919: catalytic activity of artificial and natural zeolites.
• Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zaitsev born 1841: rules concerning elimination of hydrogen halides from alkyl haloanhydrides and of water from alcohols; first synthesis of secondary alcohols.

• Antoine-Jerome Balard announced discovery of bromine (Br, element 35) to Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1826.
• Samuel Proctor Massie, Jr. born 1919: silicon chemistry; science education (encouraging disadvantaged students into science)
• Sergey Semenovich Nametkin born 1876: terpene chemistry; rearrangement of camphenes.

• Ernst Otto Beckmann born 1853: Beckmann rearrangement in organic chemistry; Beckmann thermometer.
• NASA Pathfinder landed on Mars, 1997. Unmanned mission included physical and chemical characterization of Martian surface.

• Herbert Spencer Gasser born 1888: electrophysiology of nerves; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1944.
• John Howard Northrop born 1891: purification of enzymes and proteins; fermentation process for acetone manufacture; Nobel Prize, 1946.
• William Macquorn Rankine born 1820: thermodynamics of steam engines; absolute temperature scale (Rankine scale)
• Robert Williams of Merck, Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories announced synthesis of vitamin B₁, 1936.

• William Hobson Mills born 1873: tetrahedral ammonium ions; materials for photography in red light.
• Axel Hugo Theorell born 1903: structure of enzymes; crystallized myoglobin; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1955.

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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