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).

October 12-25

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

• General Motors was incorporated, 1916.
• Garrett Augustus Morgan received US Patent 1,113,675 for a gas mask

• Friedrich Kohlrausch born 1840: electrical conductivity; dilution of strong electrolytes
• Alfred Nobel received a Swedish patent for preparing nitroglycerine, in 1863. This has been reported (including here, previously!) as his first patent; it is not. See this partial list at the Nobel Foundation.
• Jacobus van't Hoff presented analogue of ideal gas law for the osmotic pressure of dilute solutions to Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1886

• Malcolm Harold Chisholm born 1945: inorganic and organometallic synthesis.
• First oral contraceptive, a steroid hormone norethindrone, developed by Carl Djerassi and co-workers at Syntex, 1951.
• Evangelista Torricelli born 1608: vacuum, pressure, barometer.

• William Thomas Green Morton demonstrated use of ether as an anesthetic at Massachusetts General Hospital, 1846.
• Henry Clapp Sherman born 1875: research on vitamins; view his 1922 book with Sibyl Laura Smith

• Lev Chugaev [Tschugaev] born 1873: inorganic chemistry of metal complexes; developed complexing agents for analysis
• Unocal incorporated as Union Oil Company of California, 1890.

• A ban of the artificial sweetener cyclamate is announced by the US Food and Drug Administration, 1969.
• Christian Friedrich Schönbein born 1799: discovered ozone and collodion; research on hydrogen peroxide and guncotton. Read more on the discovery and early history of ozone.
• Harvey Washington Wiley born 1844: "Father of Pure Food Law" (1906) in US, and first administrator of it. (Visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.)

• Jacques Brandenberger born 1872: invented a process for making transparent waterproof films (US patent 1,266,766), more popularly known as Cellophane. (This is an early example of a synthetic polymer made from biological feedstock and just one practical formulation of nitrocellulose.)
• Samuel Guthrie died 1848 (birth date unknown, 1782): discovered chloroform, percussion explosives.
• Craig Mello born 1960: RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2006.
• Marguerite Perey born 1909: discovered francium (Fr, element 87)

• US administrators of Bilibad Prison in the Philippines changed rice rations from white back to brown rice, 1902. The turnaround in the hitherto increasing incidence of beriberi provides a clue in the discovery of vitamins.
• Vannoccio Biringuccio born 1480: metallurgy and armaments, De la pirotechnia (in italiano).
• James Chadwick born 1891: discovered neutron; Nobel prize (Physics), 1935

• John Dalton read a paper containing his first list of atomic weights to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, 1803.
• Hermann Hellriegel born 1831: agricultural chemistry; nitrogen fixation by bacteria in root nodules of legumes.
• Alfred Nobel born 1833: invented dynamite; established Nobel Prizes and Nobel Foundation. Nobelium (No, element 102) is named after him.
• Georg Ernst Stahl born 1660: oxidation and reduction; phlogiston theory; prepared glacial acetic acid. Read excerpts from some of his writings.
• Jean-Pierre Sauvage born 1944: molecular machines, especially linked rings; Nobel Prize, 2016.
• Adolph Strecker born 1822: amino acid synthesis and degradation; sulfite alkylation. See obituary [auf Deutsch] from Berichte.

• Stephen Moulton Babcock born 1843: agricultural chemist, developed Babcock Test for determining the butterfat in milk.
• George Wells Beadle born 1903: chemical genetics; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1958.
• Clinton Joseph Davisson born 1881: wave nature of electrons (Davisson-Germer electron diffraction experiment (see original paper); Nobel Prize (physics), 1937.
• Frank Harold Spedding born 1902: reduction of rare earth elements to metallic state; uranium processing for fission

• Felix Bloch born 1905: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) theory and technology; Nobel Prize (Physics), 1952. (See a collection of references and weblinks on history of NMR and MRI.)
• Gilbert Newton Lewis born 1875: theories of chemical bond and valency; Lewis dot structures; thermodynamics; coined term photon.
• Mole Day (Moment 6:02 on 10/23).

• Pierre-Gilles de Gennes born 1932: order in liquid crystals and polymers; Nobel Prize (physics), 1991.
• Nikolai Aleksandrovich Menshutkin born 1842: kinetics of nucleophilic substitution reactions of amines and quaternary ammonium ions.
• Nylon stockings are first sold, 1939, in Wilmington, Delaware.
• Alonzo Dwight Phillips receives US patent 68 for friction matches (whose heads contained chalk, phosphorus, glue, and brimstone), 1836.
• Hendrik Roozeboom born 1854: applications of the phase rule.
• Roger Clark Wells born 1877: sodium compounds; chemical analyses of radioactive materials; chief chemist of U.S. Geological Survey.

• Edgar Clay Britton born 1891: industrial organic chemistry.
• Marjorie Jean Young Vold born 1913: kinetic and thermodynamic studies of soaps, liquid crystals, and colloidal suspensions; Garvan Medal, 1967.

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