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

December 21-January 3

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

• John Mayow baptized 1641 (birth date uncertain): discovered that air contained two gases, one of which ("spiritus nitro-aerous") supported life and combustion. Read his Tractatus Quinque Medico-physici in English.
• Hermann Joseph Muller born 1890: theory of genes; mutation by X-rays; Nobel Prize (medicine), 1946.

• St. Elmo Brady born 1884: first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry.
• William Lloyd Evans born 1870 (or 1871?): chemistry of carbohydrates; click for more details on carbohydrate nomenclature.
• Arie Jan Haagen-Smit born 1900: nature and source of smog; smog abatement.
• Vladimir Markovnikov born 1838: synthesis of cyclobutane and cyclopentane derivatives; Markovnikov's rule for additions to alkenes. (Read a recent article about a modern attempt to replicate Markovnikov's work on his eponymous rule.)
• John Clarke Slater born 1900: orbital approaches to quantum chemistry (Slater-type orbitals, Slater determinant); tetrahedral carbon compounds.
• M. Stanley Whittingham born 1941: lithium ion batteries; Nobel Prize, 2019

• Axel Fredrik Cronstedt born 1722: discovered nickel (Ni, element 28) and zeolite; classification of minerals
• Anna Jane Harrison born 1912: first female president of American Chemical Society (1978); president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983-84).
• Stefan Hell born 1962: very high-resolution fluorescence microscopy; Nobel Prize, 2014.
• Helen Abbott Michael born 1857: chemical composition of plants; synthetic organic chemistry; author (under the pseudonym Celen Sabbrin), of Science and Philosophy in Art.
• Paul Schützenberger born 1829: physiological chemistry.

• James Prescott Joule born 1818: thermodynamics; mechanical equivalent of heat (Read his paper and view his apparatus); Joule-Thomson effect (temperature of gas falls when the gas expands without doing work); kinetic theory of gases
• Benjamin Rush born 1745: signer of Declaration of Independence; published first American chemistry textbook
• Augustus Vernon-Harcourt born 1834: invented 10-candlepower standard lamp using pentane

• Herman Frasch born 1851: sulfur mining (Frasch process, developed in Louisiana)
• William Gregor born 1761: discovered titanium (Ti, element 22); analysis of minerals
• Gerhard Herzberg born 1904: spectroscopic analysis of electronic structure and geometry of molecules and radicals; Nobel Prize, 1971
• Isaac Newton born 1642: made fundamental contributions to physics (gravitation, optics, mechanics) and mathematics (calculus); researcher in chymistry. (Read his ideas about atoms and the rest of his Opticks.)
• Ludwig Ferdinand Wilhelmy born 1812: chemical kinetics; first measurement of homogeneous reaction rate (or see entire paper auf Deutsch).
• Adolf Windaus born 1876: synthesis of histamine; structure of cholesterol; research on sterols; vitamin D; Nobel Prize, 1928

• Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium (element 88, Ra), 1898.
• Ali Javan born 1928: inventor of helium-neon laser, the first gas laser and first continuous-wave (CW) laser.
• Clemens Winkler born 1838: discovered germanium (Ge, element 32); analysis of gases

• Gerardus Johannes Mulder born 1802: protein analysis; physiological chemistry (including chemistry of wine).
• Louis Pasteur born 1822: research in molecular dissymmetry (optical activity of tartaric acids), fermentation, decomposition, microbes, and anti-microbial treatment of beverages (pasteurization)

• Ernest Eliel born 1921: organic stereochemistry and conformational analysis
• Karl Remigius Fresenius born 1818: qualitative and quantitative analytical chemistry
• Kary Mullis born 1944: developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for making copies of DNA; Nobel Prize, 1993
• Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of new rays, 1895, inspiring research that would lead to a thousand papers on X-rays within a year.
• Lewis Hastings Sarett synthesized cortisone at Merck, Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, 1944.

• Ellen Gleditsch born 1879: nuclear chemistry; half life of radium.
• Charles Goodyear born 1800: vulcanization of rubber (US patent 3,633)
• Helen Vaughn Michel born 1932: neutron activation analysis, with applications to archeology and geology
• Alexander Parkes born 1813: invented parkesine (later called xylonite, a kind of celluloid); electroplating
• Harold Urey and co-workers announced discovery of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen (H, element 1), 1931. (Link to a register of Urey's papers.)

• William David Coolidge of General Electric is issued US Patent 1,082,933 for ductile tungsten for incandescent bulb filaments, 1913. [See also Oliver Sacks' memoir Uncle Tungsten for a personal account of this topic in England.]
• Youyou Tu born 1930: discovery of artemisinin, an antimalarial treatment from traditional Chinese medicine; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2015.

• Hermann Boerhaave born 1668: physician and chemist, Elementa Chemiae
• Colin Garfield Fink born 1881: electrochemical research, development, industry, and education; president of the Electrochemical Society
• Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac read his memoir on combining volumes of gases to the Philomathic Society of Arcueil, 1808.
• Avram Hershko born 1937: ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation; Nobel Prize, 2004
• Gilbert Stork born 1921: organic synthesis; first stereorational synthesis (cantharidin, 1951); stereoselective total synthesis of quinine.

• Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA, originally Pittsburgh Reduction Company) renamed, 1907
• U. S. Atomic Energy Commission took over nuclear oversight from wartime Manhattan Engineer District, 1947. (Visit its successor, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)
• Cigarettes in the US must carry warning label, "Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health," since 1966, mandated by the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965. Since then, labeling requirements have evolved as has the FDA approach to tobacco.
• Eugène-Anatole Demarçay born 1852: discovered europium (Eu, element 63); spectroscopic evidence of the discovery of radium (Ra, 88)
• Robert John Kane proposed existence of ethyl radical (ethereum) in 1833 (before Liebig).
• Merck & Co. founded, 1891.

• Roger Adams born 1889: organic synthesis. An ACS award in organic synthesis is named for Adams.
• Isaac Asimov born 1920: biochemist; author of hundreds of books in science fiction and many non-fiction subjects (See Asimov bibliography.).
• Rudolf Clausius born 1822: fundamental contributions to thermodynamics and kinetic theory of gases; coined the term entropy. Read his Über die bewegende Kraft der Wärme auf Deutsch (Part I and Part II) or in English translation (Mechanical Theory of Heat).
• Charles Hatchett born 1765: discovered niobium (Nb, element 41), which he called columbium
• Walter Heitler born 1904: quantum-mechanical treatment of molecular hydrogen (Heitler-London approach).
• Julia Vsevolodovna Lermontova born 1847 [Gregorian date]: separation and atomic weight of platinum-group metals

• Henry Bradley, Binghamton, NY, patented oleomargarine (U.S. Patent No. 110,626) in 1871.
• Keith James Laidler born 1916: chemical kinetics; history of physical chemistry and of science and technology.

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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