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

August 11-24

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

• Bristol-Myers (now Bristol-Myers Squibb) incorporated 1933.
• Erwin Chargaff born 1905: base-pairing in DNA
• Harold Baily Dixon born 1852: combustion and explosions of gases
• Christiaan Eijkman born 1858: discovered Vitamin B₁ (thiamine) and its role in beriberi; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1929.
• Cato Maximilian Guldberg born 1836: formulated law of mass action (with brother-in-law Peter Waage)
• Aaron Klug born 1926: investigation of nucleic-acid protein complexes with crystallographic electron microscopy; Nobel prize, 1982

• Margaret Burbidge born Eleanor Margaret Peachey 1919: stellar nucleosynthesis of chemical elements; president of AAAS; director of Royal Observatory (Greenwich, UK)
• Joseph Lister first uses antiseptic chemicals in surgery, 1865. Read part of his report.
• James Muspratt born 1793: manufacture of acids; father of James Sheridan Muspratt (author of Chemistry, Theoretical, Practical and Analytical as applied and relating to the Arts and Manufactures).
• Erwin Schrödinger born 1887: quantum mechanics (wave mechanics); Schrödinger equation; Nobel prize (Physics), 1933

• Anders Jonas Ångström born 1814: emission and absorption spectra of chemical elements; angstrom unit = 10^-10 m.
• Salvador Luria born 1912: microbial genetics; Nobel prize (Medicine), 1969
• Julian Friedrich Miescher born 1844: discovered nucleic acids.
• John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) and William Ramsay made preliminary announcement of the discovery of argon (Ar, element 18) at BAAS meeting, 1894.
• Frederick Sanger born 1918: structure of proteins including insulin; base-pair sequences of nucleic acids; Nobel prize, 1958 and 1980.
• George Gabriel Stokes born 1819: mathematical physicist; fluorescence (Stokes shift is named for him); spectroscopy; fluid dynamics (Navier-Stokes equations)
• Richard Martin Willstätter born 1872: aliphatic amines and alkaloids; Nobel prize, 1915

• Paul Doughty Bartlett born 1907: kinetics and mechanisms of organic reactions
• Richard Robert Ernst: high-resolution NMR spectroscopy, particularly Fourier-transform and two-dimensional methods; Nobel prize, 1991.
• May Sybil Leslie born 1887: decay of thorium and characterization of isotopes of radon (known then as emanations of thorium and actinium)
• Hans Christian Ørsted born 1777: first to isolate aluminum (Al, element 13); electricity and magnetism (Ørsted effect)

• Louis de Broglie born 1892: wave-particle duality (de Broglie relation); Nobel Prize (physics), 1929.
• Gerty Theresa Cori (née Radnitz) born 1896: carbohydrate metabolism; discovered how glycogen is catalytically converted; Nobel prize (Medicine) (with husband, Carl), 1947.
• Richard Heck born 1931: palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis; Nobel prize, 2010.
• William Augustus Tilden born 1842: specific heats of elements; organic bases and alkaloids. Read his Famous Chemists.

• Frederic Stanley Kipping born 1863: optical activity, organosilicon compounds, particularly silicones.
• Johan Kjeldahl born 1849: analytical method for nitrogen; Kjeldahl flask.
• Anne L'Huillier born 1958; electron dynamics via attosecond pulses of electromagnetic radiation, Nobel Prize (Physics), 2023.
• Wendell Meredith Stanley born 1904: chemical nature of viruses; crystallized tobacco mosaic virus; Nobel prize, 1946

• Aldrich Chemical (now part of Millipore Sigma) established 1951
• Walter Noddack born 1893: co-discoverer of rhenium (Re, element 75) with wife Ida and Otto Berg
• John Francis Queeny born 1859: founded Monsanto, one of the world's most controversial agribusinesses, now a part of Bayer

• Hewlett Packard incorporated, 1947.
• Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen found a line in the solar spectrum subsequently identified with helium, 1868.
• First oral contraceptive, Enovid, marketed by G D Searle (now part of Pfizer), 1960.

• Johan Gottlieb Gahn born 1745: discovered and isolated manganese (Mn, element 25)
• Julius Lothar Meyer born 1830: periodic law; in particular periodicity of atomic volume. [Link to more information: Meyer's 1870 table of the elements]

• Jöns Jakob Berzelius born 1779: meticulous analyst; elemental symbols; compiled accurate table of atomic weights; discovered selenium (Se, element 48), cerium (Ce, 58), silicon (Si, 14), and thorium (Th, 90); concepts of allotropy, catalysis, and isomerism; dualistic theory of bonding; term "halogen"
• Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner isolated first macroscopic quantity of plutonium (Pu, element 94) at University of Chicago, 1942.
• First version of John A. R. Newlands' law of octaves published, 1864. This arrangement of the elements in order of atomic weight shows periodic behavior. (Octave analogy was used but not yet called law of octaves.)
• Hideki Shirakawa born 1936: conductive polymers; Nobel Prize, 2000.

• Charles-Frédéric Gerhardt born 1816: organic structures: theory of residues, theory of types, homologous series; atomic weights; Traité de Chimie Organique (4 volumes, en français)
• Warren Kendall Lewis born 1882: thermal properties of materials and colloids; idea for fluid bed reactor; MIT chemical engineer
• William Murdoch born 1754: coal gas for lighting; steam engine.
• Jean Servais Stas born 1813: chemical analysis and determination of atomic weights

• Willis Rodney Whitney born 1868: director of General Electric research laboratories

• Robert Curl born 1933: fullerenes (see paper in Nature); Nobel Prize, 1996
• Bradley Dewey born 1887: "czar" of WW II synthetic rubber production
• Konstantin Novoselov born 1974: graphene; Nobel Prize (Physics), 2010.
• Thomas Steitz born 1940: ribosome; Nobel Prize, 2009.
• Hamilton Smith born 1931: restriction enzymes; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1978

• Elizabeth Hazen born 1885: co-discoverer of the fungicide nystatin (US patent 2,797,183), the first antibiotic used effectively to treat human fungal infections.
• Morris Kharasch born 1895: synthetic applications of free-radical chemistry
• PPG Industries incorporated, 1883

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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