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

November 9-22

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

• Gail Borden born 1801: modern preserved food industry.
• Thomas Drummond heated a ball of lime in front of a reflector, 1825. This first practical use of limelight leads to improvements in theater and lighthouse lighting.
• Researchers at GSI, Darmstadt, Germany, made three atoms of Element 110 (Darmstadtium, Ds), 1994.
• Grace Medes born 1886: metabolism of fatty acids and of sulfur and sulfur-containing amino acids
• Robert Millikan coined the term cosmic rays, 1925, confirming earlier observations of unexplained penetrating radiation.
• Ronald George Wreyford Norrish born 1897: kinetics of extremely fast reactions; Nobel Prize, 1967
• Jack Szostak born 1952: telomerase; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2009.

• 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.

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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