All RSC Education articles in Non-EiC content – Page 7

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On This Day - Jan 26 : Nuclear fission reported

The discovery was made by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and was interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frish. Danish physicist Niels Bohr then reported the discovery of nuclear fission at the Washington conference. Related resources: Chemistry will play a central role to the future of UK nuclear The ...
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On This Day - Jan 31 : Irving Langmuir was born

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work on monolayers and surface absorption. He was the first non-academic chemist to be awarded the prize.
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On This Day - May 01 : AC motor patented

Not only was this the first alternating current (AC) motor, but it also heralded a new system of power transmission, which is the basis for the mains power we use today. The Serbian-American physicist, engineer and inventor is recognised as one of the pioneers of electric power.
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On This Day - Jun 01 : Flixborough disaster

A temporary pipe containing cyclohexane caught fire and burst. It left 28 people dead, 36 injured and around 1800 nearby buildings damaged. Consequently, UK government regulations in hazardous industrial processes were significantly tightened.
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On This Day - Oct 01 : Thalidomide was marketed

This notorious drug was marketed as a mild sleeping pill that was safe even for pregnant women. It wasn’t until 1962 that the severe side effects were revealed, where it had caused the development of malformed limbs in babies.
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On This Day - Dec 01 : Martin Klaproth was born

In 1789 he discovered uranium (U), which was named after the planet Uranus. This planet was actually discovered eight years earlier by another German scientist, William Hershel.