All RSC Education articles in Non-EiC content – Page 120
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 24 : Morris Travers was born
He worked with Scottish chemist William Ramsay to discover the noble gases krypton (Kr), xenon (Xe) and neon (Ne). He also played a pivotal role in setting up the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 23 : Chemical Society first meet
In 1980, the Chemical Society merged with the Royal Institute of Chemistry, Faraday Society and the Society for Analytical Chemistry to become what is now known as the Royal Society of Chemistry.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 22 : Alan J Heeger was born
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for “their discovery and development of conductive polymers”. They found that modified plastics could conduct electricity, which has many commercial uses such as LEDs and mobile telephone display screens.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 21 : Magnesium produced
Magnesium (Mg) was first extracted from seawater through an electrolytic process. Is the lightest of all structural elements – one-third less dense than aluminium – and is used in flares, pyrotechnics, incendiary bombs, aeroplane and missile construction.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 21 : Henrik Dam was born
He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1943 along with Edward Doisy for their discovery of vitamin K. Vitamin K is part of a group of fat-soluble vitamins that are needed for blood coagulation and in metabolic pathways.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 20 : de Chancourtois was born
He was the first person to organise elements by atomic weights, by plotting a graph of the elements around a cylinder with a circumference of 16 units corresponding to the weight of oxygen (O). Elements that appeared above and below each other shared similar periodic properties.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 19 : Svante Arrhenius was born
He is one of the founders of physical chemistry and perhaps most famous for proposing the Arrhenius equation, which describes the rate of a chemical reaction.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 18 : Introduction of isotope
British chemist Frederick Soddy coined the term isotope (from the Greek, meaning ‘in the same place’) to describe different elements that can be chemically indistinguishable but have different atomic weights and characteristics.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 17 : Friedrich Kohlrausch died
His research focussed on the thermal, electrical and magnetic properties of electrolytes. He is recognised as one of the most important experimental physicists, with his early work contributing to the absolute system of electrical and magnetic measuring units.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 17 : Beilstein was born
He published a still-popular standard reference work on organic chemistry, called the “Handbuch der organischen Chemie”. It contained approximately 2,200 pages on 15,000 organic compounds.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 16 : Andres Ekeberg was born
He discovered tantalum (Ta), which is named after the character Tantalus from Greek mythology. It is a rare transition metal that is highly resistant to corrosion.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 16 : Man-made diamonds produced
The small diamonds were produced in Stockholm by the ASEA, one of Sweden’s major electrical manufacturing companies. The ASEA had employed a team of five scientists and engineers to work on the top-secret diamond-making project QUINTUS.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 15 : Water composition announced
He revealed that water was a compound of hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O), which was known at the time as “dephlogistonated air”. He later discovered the composition of air and made the first calculations of the Earth’s mass.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 15 : von Euler-Chelpin was born
He shared the 1929 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Arthur Harden for their investigations on the fermentation of sugar and on fermentative enzymes.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 14 : Paul Vieille died
He invented modern nitrocellulose-based smokeless gunpowder in 1884. The smokeless powder was three times more powerful than black powder for the same weight and left virtually no residues of combustion.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 14 : Silly putty was first made
The first Silly Putty was made by mixing silicone oil with boric acid. This formula has remained essentially unchanged for 50 years, and more than 4,500 tons have been sold since 1950.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 13 : Ford patented plastic car
The Soybean car, or “Hemp body car”, was the first car to have a body entirely made of plastic. It was 30% lighter than a regular metal car and the panels were said to be only a quarter of an inch (6 mm) thick.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 13 : Julius Thomsen died
He predicted the existence of the noble gases before they were discovered. He was also interested in thermochemistry, measuring the heat produced from around 3,500 chemical reactions.
-
Resource
On This Day - Jan 12 : Antonio de Ulloa was born
He is credited with the discovery of platinum (Pt) after publishing in 1748 accounts of his time in South America. Platinum had actually been used by pre-columbian civilisations, making Ulloa’s work of a‘re-discovery’.
-
Resource
On This Day - Feb 12 : Wentorf made borazon
Borazon, a material hard enough to scratch diamonds, is created by heating equal quantities of boron and nitrogen at temperatures greater than 1,800 °C. It is used to manufacture high-precision steel and to sharpen high-speed steel tools.