February in Chemistry

• Emilio Segrè born 1905: codiscovered technetium (Tc, element 43) and astatine (At, 85); spontaneous fission; antiproton; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1959
• Roger Yonchien Tsien born 1952: green fluorescent protein, GFP; Nobel Prize, 2008.

• Jean Baptiste Boussingault born 1802: agricultural chemistry; isolated and named sorbitol; role of nitrogen in plant nutrition.
• Leaded gasoline first marketed in the US in Dayton, OH, 1923. Thomas Midgley, Jr., of General Motors Research labs added tetraethyllead to gasoline.
• Albert Schatz born 1920: discovery of antitubercular agent streptomycin. Schatz's version of the discovery differs from the standard account in which Selman Waksman receives near-exclusive credit. View the patent.

• Leonora Neuffer Bilger born 1893: asymmetric nitrogen compounds; Garvan Medal, 1953

• Joseph Goldberger begins the experiment that demonstrates that pellagra is a dietary disease, 1915. See part of his report.
• Friedrich Hund born 1896: Hund's rules for electron configurations, the first of which predicts maximum multiplicity of spin; molecular-orbital theory (Hund-Mulliken approach).
• John Jacob Livingood made radium E (²¹⁰Bi) by bombarding common bismuth with deuterons, 1936, the first synthetis of a radioactive substance in the US.

• John Boyd Dunlop born 1840; manufactured pneumatic rubber tires.
• Lafayette Benedict Mendel born 1872: modern science of nutrition; codiscovered vitamin A and B complex; linked nutritive value of proteins to their amino acids.

• William Parry Murphy born 1892: diabetes; pernicious anemia and other blood diseases; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1934
• Clemens Winkler, in the course of analyzing a mineral, discovered element (germanium, Ge, element 32) in 1886, consistent with predictions by J. A. R. Newlands and Dmitrii Mendeleev.
• Nikolai Dmitrievich Zelinskii born 1861: catalysis of hydrocarbon disproportionations; bromination of fatty acids (Hell-Volhard-Zelinsky reaction)

• Ulf Svante von Euler born 1905: identification of noradrenaline (norepinephrine) as a neurotransmitter; son of 1929 Nobel laureate biochemist Hans von Euler-Chelpin; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1970.
• John Brown Francis Herreshoff born 1850: manufacture of sulfuric acid

• Bernard Courtois born 1777: discovered iodine (I, element 53) from seaweed
• Moses Gomberg born 1866: work on triphenylmethyl (first stable organic free radical); tautomerism
• Robert Holton announces total synthesis of taxol, an important cancer drug, 1994.
• Francis Robert Japp born 1848: benzil, benzoin, and phenanthraquinone.
• Dmitrii Mendeleev born 1834 (some sources say Feb. 7): periodic law and periodic table. (Link to Mendeleev's 1869 periodic table or an improved 1871 version.)
• Friedlieb Runge born 1795: discovered carbolic acid (phenol) and aniline in coal tar; dry distillation

• Edward Charles Baly born 1871: showed that organic compounds, including sugars, can be formed photochemically from water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia
• Californium (Cf, element 98) discovered by (left to right) Kenneth Street, Jr., Stanley G. Thompson, Glenn T. Seaborg, and Albert Ghiorso using ion-exchange chromatography at University of California, Berkeley, 1950.
• Lloyd Ferguson born 1918: chemical educator
• Norman Bruce Hannay born 1921: materials for solid state electronics

• Per Teodor Cleve born 1840: discovered holmium and thulium; suggested "didymium" was not elementary; naphthalene derivatives.
• John Franklin Enders born 1897: showed polio virus was not only neurotropic; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1954.
• Ira Remsen born 1846: prominent American organic chemist; founder of American Chemical Journal; first professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University; saccharin was discovered in his lab

• Fred Basolo born 1920: organometallics.
• Josiah Willard Gibbs born 1839: thermodynamics and the phase rule; the Gibbs free energy is named after him.
• Izaak Kolthoff born 1894: analytical chemistry.
• Alwin Mittasch [auf Deutsch] and Christian Schneider filed US patent application for catalytic production of methanol from carbon monoxide and hydrogen (U.S. patent 1,201,850) in 1914.
• William Henry Fox Talbot born 1800: photography pioneer.

• Pierre-Louis Dulong [en Français] born 1785: discovered nitrogen trichloride; refractive indices and specific heats of gases; law of Dulong and Petit (specific heat times atomic weight is the same for many elements); suggested that acids were compounds of hydrogen; formula for heat content of fuel (Dulong formula)
• Moritz Traube born 1826: physiological chemist; semipermeable membranes, sugars, respiration, fermentation, putrefaction, oxidation, protoplasm, and muscle

• Heinrich Caro born 1834: Caro's acid (H₂SO₅), dye chemistry.
• Étienne-François Geoffroy born 1672: chemical affinities; displacement reactions in salt
• Henry Clemens Pearson born 1858: rubber scientist and editor; see his 1899 book, Crude rubber and compounding ingredients

• Evan Jay Crane born 1889: editor of Chemical Abstracts, 1915-58.
• Herbert Aaron Hauptman born 1917: mathematical methods for crystal structures; Nobel Prize, 1985.
• Lawrencium (Lr, element 103) was produced in 1961 by Torbjorn Sikkeland, Albert Ghiorso, and Almon Larsh and Robert Latimer, at University of California, Berkeley.
• Julius Nieuwland born 1878: synthetic rubber pioneer (US patent 1,811,959); acetylene chemistry
• Agnes Pockels born 1862: liquid surfaces: surface tension and films; invention of the slide trough and surface film balance. Read her article on surface tension.
• Dennis Searle and E. M. Skillings found borax and other soluble salts near San Bernardino, CA, 1873.

• Hans K. A. S. von Euler-Chelpin born 1873: enzymes and fermentation; father of 1970 Nobel laureate Ulf Svante von Euler; Nobel Prize, 1929
• George Johnstone Stoney born 1826: suggested that electrical charge came in discrete units; coined term electron for "atom of electricity".

• Synthesis of diamond by Francis Bundy, H. Tracy Hall, Herbert Strong, & Robert H. Wentoff, Jr., at General Electric Research Laboratories announced in 1955.
• Julius Thomsen born 1826: heats of reaction, relative strength of acids, manufacture of soda from cryolite
• John Rex Whinfield born 1901: terephthalic acid polyester fibers (terylene).
• Robert Williams born 1886: isolation, synthesis, and manufacture of Vitamin B₁ (thiamine).

• Friedrich Konrad Beilstein born 1838: his standard reference work on organic chemistry was first published in 1880-83 and has been updated ever since
• Wallace Henry Coulter born 1913: instrument maker; developed instrumentation to characterize particles.
• Otto Stern born 1888: quantization of angular momentum (Stern-Gerlach experiment); Nobel Prize (physics), 1943.

• John Sinfelt born 1931: platinum-iridium catalysts in petroleum refining. Read a book chapter by Sinfelt on materials and catalysis.
• Frederick Soddy introduced the term "isotopic" (meaning "same place") for elements which share the same place in the periodic table in 1913.
• Alessandro Volta born 1745: invented the voltaic pile, the first electric battery; discovered and isolated methane. The unit of electric potential, the volt, is named in his honor. Link to some of his writings (in Italiano).

• Svante Arrhenius born 1859: electrolytic dissociation, viscosity, reaction rates, and even the greenhouse effect; Nobel prize, 1903
• Louis-Georges Gouy born 1854: interfacial electrical double layer.
• Roderick MacKinnon born 1956: structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels; Nobel Prize, 2003
• One atom of mendelevium (Md, element 101) was produced by Gregory R. Choppin, Glenn Seaborg, Bernard G. Harvey, and Albert Ghiorso in 1955 by bombarding a billion atoms of ²⁵³Es with helium.
• Ferdinand Reich born 1799: codiscovered indium (In, element 49)

• Isaac Adams, Jr. born 1836: pioneer in nickel plating.
• Ludwig Boltzmann born 1844: statistical mechanics; thermodynamics, especially the second law; Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecular speeds; Stefan-Boltzmann law of blackbody radiation; Boltzmann constant is named after him
• Henry Eyring born 1901: chemical kinetics (transition-state theory, Eyring equation)
• Helen Murray Free born 1923: diagnostic chemistry: reagents and instrumentation for clinical diagnosis in blood and urine chemistry, histology, and cytology
• Robert Huber born 1937: three-dimensional structure of proteins involved in photosynthesis; Nobel Prize, 1988

• Carl Henrik Dam born 1895: vitamin K as a dietary factor in blood clotting; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1943.
• Oliver Wolcott Gibbs born 1822: early American inorganic and analytical chemist (Harvard); founding member of US National Academy of Sciences
• Edwin Land demonstrates Polaroid camera to optical society meeting, 1947.
• John Mercer born 1791: treated cotton with caustic soda (mercerized cotton); discovered some calico dyes
• Dorothy Virginia Nightingale born 1902: synthetic organic chemistry, particularly reactions of alkylbenzenes in the presence of aluminum chloride; Garvan Medal, 1959

• Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted born 1879: acid-base theory and properties of ions; kinetics and catalysis; nitramide
• Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen born 1824: astronomical spectroscopy and photography, particularly of the Sun; found a line in the solar spectrum subsequently identified with helium.
• Friedrich Wöhler wrote a letter to J. J. Berzelius stating that he had synthesized urea, an early synthesis of an organic compound from inorganic materials, 1828.

• First organizational meeting of the Chemical Society of London, 1841. (Click on its successor organization, the Royal Society of Chemistry.)
• Casimir Funk born 1884: discovered vitamins and named them (vitamines)
• Charles Martin Hall first produced electrolytic aluminum in 1886 (US patent 400,766).
• Thomas Midgley, Jr., received US patent 1,573,846 for tetraethyllead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline, 1926.
• Glenn Theodore Seaborg and coworkers chemically identified plutonium (Pu, element 94) at University of California, Berkeley, 1941.

• First atom of element 107, eventually named Bohrium (Bh) was observed at GSI Laboratories, Darmstadt, Germany in 1981.
• John Gorham born 1783: wrote Elements of Chemical Science, an early American chemistry text. (View a contemporary review of it.)
• Karl Graebe born 1841: organic synthesis (alizarin) and nomenclature (ortho, meta, para prefixes).
• Eugène Melchior Peligot born 1811: isolated uranium metal; identified glucose in diabetics' urine.
• William Summer Johnson born 1913: synthesis of complex molecules

• Ruth Leroi Benesch born 1925: oxygen-carrying capacity of hemoglobin; role of sulfur in proteins
• Arthur Becket Lamb born 1880: editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, 1917-1949.
• Phoebus Aaron Theodor Levene born (as Fishel Aaronovich Lenin) 1869: biochemistry, hexosamines, and stereochemistry.
• Ida Eva Noddack born (as Ida Tacke) 1896: co-discoverer of rhenium (Re, element 75) with husband Walter and Otto Berg; suggested (correctly) that nuclear fission rather than transuranic elements explained results reported by Enrico Fermi.
• Mary Locke Petermann born 1908: ribosomes and protein synthesis

• Marjorie Beckett Caserio born 1929: physical organic chemistry: kinetics and mechanisms; chemical education: Basic Principles of Organic Chemistry
• Benoit Paul Emile Clapeyron born 1799: relationship between temperature, volume, and heat of vaporization (Clapeyron and Clausius-Clapeyron equations).
• Herbert Henry Dow born 1866: founder of Dow Chemical.
• Giulio Natta born 1903: polymer chemistry including polymer stereochemistry; Nobel Prize, 1963
• William Joseph Sparks born 1905: advances in synthetic rubber.
• Ahmed Zewail born 1946: "femtochemistry" (dynamics on a sub-picosecond time scale); Nobel Prize, 1999

• Robert Grubbs born 1942: metathesis reactions and catalysts; Nobel Prize, 2005.
• Alice Hamilton born 1869: occupational medicine; hazards of carbon monoxide, mercury, tetraethyllead, benzene, and others; first woman professor at Harvard.
• James Chadwick's note announcing the possible discovery of the neutron is published in Nature, 1932.
• Karl Friedrich Wenzel died 1793 (birth date unknown c. 1740): stoichiometry; concentration determines the speed of chemical reactions.

• Edward Goodrich Acheson received US patent number 492,767 for production of artificial silicon carbide ("Carborundum"), 1893.
• Steven Chu: laser cooling and trapping of atoms; Nobel (physics), 1997.
• Edmond Fremy born 1814: plumbates, stannates, and ferrates; preparation of anhydrous hydrogen fluoride; coloring of flowers and saponification of fats
• Philip Showalter Hench born 1896: hormones of the adrenal cortex; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1950
• Linus Carl Pauling born 1901: molecular structure, bonding (hybrid orbitals), electronegativity, and resonance (The Nature of the Chemical Bond); Nobel Prize, 1954; Nobel Peace Prize, 1962

February 29

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