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

October 5-18

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

• Chemical Society of Union College, a precursor of the American Chemical Society, founded in 1861.
• Dirk Coster born 1889: co-discoverer of hafnium (Hf, element 72)
• Mahlon Hoagland born 1921: discovered transfer RNA.
• Hamish Small born 1929: ion chromatography.

• Announcement of 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance."
• Humphry Davy, working at the Royal Institution, isolated potassium, 1807.
• François Magendie born 1783: classic studies in nutrition and experimental pharmacology; importance of proteins; effects of morphine, strychnine, and other chemical agents on human beings.
• William Remington of Boston received US patent 82,877 for nickel electroplating, 1868.
• Florence Seibert born 1897: biochemistry of tuberculosis; Garvan Medal, 1942.
• Ernest Walton born 1903: artificial transmutation of elements by bombarding accelerated nuclei (view apparatus) with John Douglas Cockcroft; Nobel Prize (physics), 1951.
• David Baker born 1962: computational protein design; Nobel Prize, 2024.

• Announcement of 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"
• Niels Bohr born 1885: quantized planetary model of the atom (Bohr atom); explanation of hydrogen atom spectrum; correspondence principle in quantum theory; Nobel prize (Physics), 1922. Bohrium (Bh, element 107) is named for him.
• Harold Walter Kroto born 1939: fullerenes. Nobel Prize, 1996.
• James Logan Waters born 1925: liquid chromatography; founded Waters Corporation.

• Announcement of 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi "for the development of metal–organic frameworks"
• Henri-Louis Le Chatelier born 1850: effects of pressure and temperature on chemical equilibrium (Le Chatelier's principle); chemistry of silicates; mass action in explosives
• Mary Engle Pennington born 1872: her career combined bacteriological chemistry with refrigeration engineering to make her an authority on food preservation.
• Rodney Robert Porter born 1917: biochemist determined four-chain structure of antibodies; Nobel prize (medicine), 1972.
• Jens Christian Skou born 1918: ion-transporting enzyme; Nobel prize, 1997.
• Otto Heinrich Warburg born 1883: respiration and cancer; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1931
• Saul Winstein born 1912: physical organic chemistry; mechanisms of organic reactions

• Hermann Emil Fischer born 1852: synthesis of sugars and their stereochemistry (Fischer projections), uric acid, caffeine, and other contributions to organic chemistry; Nobel Prize, 1902
• Max von Laue born 1879: X-rays and crystal structure (Laue method); Nobel prize (Physics), 1914. View chapters in Fifty Years of X-Ray Diffraction, edited by P. P. Ewald, describing Laue's discovery and subsequent developments of it, as well as biographical information on Laue.
• Pierre-Joseph Macquer born 1718: research on arsenates and platinum. View his Dictionnaire de Chymie (1766, en français) [Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3] or read a couple of its entries or his Elements of the Theory and Practice of Chymistry in English translation (volume 1 or volume 2).
• Peter Mansfield born 1933: magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), an application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to medical imaging; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 2003.

• Carolyn Bertozzi born 1966: bioorthogonal click chemistry; Nobel Prize, 2022
• Henry Cavendish born 1731: discovered hydrogen (H, element 1); recognized water was not an element; investigated nitrogen-containing compounds and atmospheric nitrogen. Read the classic 19th-century biography of Cavendish, the definitive 20th/21st-century biography or Cavendish's Experiments on Air.
• Yves Chauvin born 1930: mechanism of metathesis reactions; Nobel Prize, 2005
• Gerhard Ertl born 1936: surface catalysis; Nobel Prize, 2007
• Leroy Hood born 1938: automated DNA sequencer for Human Genome Project. Read his 2002 Kyoto Prize address [in Japanese and English].
• Arthur Lapworth born 1872: organic reaction mechanisms; organic ions.

• Friedrich Bergius born 1884: coal liquefaction; high-pressure chemical reactions; Nobel Prize, 1931
• Fausto de Elhuyar born 1755: co-discoverer of tungsten (W, element 74)
• Harold Johnston born 1920: kinetics and photochemistry; atmospheric chemistry, particularly of ozone.

• Josiah Parsons Cooke born 1827: introduced laboratory instruction to undergraduate chemistry curriculum at Harvard. (View his book on religion and chemistry.)
• Arthur Harden born 1865: enzymes and fermentation; structure of zymase; Nobel Prize, 1929
• Vladimir Kistiakowsky (or Kistiakovskii) born 1865: electrochemistry and thermodynamics
• Ascanio Sobrero born 1812: discovered nitroglycerine.

• 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.)

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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