All Resource articles – Page 77

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On This Day – Jul 13 : Cannizzaro was born

He was the first chemist to see the full significance of Avogadro’s law. In the 1850s, Cannizzaro suggested comparing everything to the mass of a hydrogen (H) atom. This helped chemists establish chemical formulae and make reliable chemical calculations.
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On This Day – Jul 16 : Nuclear bomb detonated

The test took place at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The explosion produced the power equivalent to approximately 20,000 tons of tri-nitro-toulene (TNT), and left a crater of radioactive glass in the desert 330 m wide.
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On This Day – Jul 02 : Sir William Bragg was born

He shared the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his son William Lawrence Bragg for pioneering x-ray crystallography. This technique uses the diffraction pattern observed from x-rays beams hitting a crystal sample to deduce the structure of complex molecules.
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On This Day – Jul 01 : Charles Goodyear died

He was the inventor of vulcanized rubber, a baked mixture of rubber and sulfur (S) that creates a strengthened compound. The process reinvented rubber as a useful substance that could withstand the variations of day-to-day temperatures. Rubber alone freezes in winter and melts in summer.
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On This Day - Jun 26 : Fluorine was isolated

The existence of fluorine (F) was well known, but for years scientists had failed to isolate it from its compounds, with some even dying in the attempt (called “fluorine martyrs”). Fluorine is the lightest of the halogen elements and has one single stable isotope, ¹⁹F.
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On This Day - Jun 16 : First vanadium isolated

Vanadium (V) is a useful transition metal. Adding small amounts of vanadium to steel considerably increases its strength. Vanadium oxide (V₂O₅) is used as a catalyst in the industrial manufacture of sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄).
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On This Day - Jun 15 : Pilâtre de Rozier died

Pilâtre de Rozier was a pioneer of aviation, but he and his partner Pierre Romain were sadly killed when trying to cross the English Channel in a hot air balloon fuelled by hydrogen. Their balloon deflated and crash-landed just 5 km away from the starting point.
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On This Day - May 29 : Explorers climb Everest

At 8848m high, there is only one-third of the oxygen (O₂) at the summit of Everest compared to that at sea level. The two climbers used oxygen gas to help them reach the top, but could only stay for 15 minutes as the oxygen levels ran low.
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On This Day - May 19 : Max Perutz was born

He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 with John Kendrew for their studies of the structures of haemoglobin and globular proteins using x-ray diffraction. He also investigated the flow of glaciers, making a crystallographic study of the transformation of snow into glacial ice.
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On This Day - May 12 : Dorothy Hodgkin was born

Hodgkin is one of the most famous female chemists, and is known for her investigations into the structure of natural products using x-ray analysis. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for these contributions.
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On This Day - May 04 : Louis Thénard was born

He was a teacher above anything else and published the textbook Traité de chimie élémentaire, théorique et pratique (4 vols., Paris, 1813-16). Thénard’s research career included the important discoveries of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) and Thénard ’s blue, which is a cheap pigment used to colour porcelain.
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On This Day - Apr 22 : Early chemical warfare

The German army attacked the French, Canadian and Algerian troops with chlorine (Cl₂) gas. A total of 50,965 tons of chemical agents were deployed during the conflict including chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas.
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On This Day - Apr 29 : Harold Urey was born

Urey co-discovered deuterium (²H) with Ferdinand Brickwedde and George Murphy. They produced the first measurable samples of the isotope from liquefied hydrogen.
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On This Day - Apr 12 : Otto Meyerhoff was born

He was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1922 for describing the way muscle tissue absorbs oxygen (O₂) and converts it to lactic acid. He also discovered that glycogen is converted into lactic acid when the muscle contracts.
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On This Day - Apr 09 : Frank Cotton was born

As well as being the youngest person to receive full professorship at MIT at only 31 years of age, he was the pioneer of studying multiple bonding between transition metal atoms. This research began with rhenium (Re) halides and in 1964 he discovered the quadruple bond in the Re₂Cl²⁻ ion.
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On This Day - Apr 10 : Robert Woodward was born

He is best known for his syntheses of complex organic substances, such as the antimalarial drug quinine, and the steroids cholesterol and cortisone. For this, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965.
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On This Day - Mar 24 : Joseph Priestley was born

He is most famous for his discovery of oxygen (O), but he also discovered laughing gas, was the first to carbonate water and was a pioneer of research into electricity.
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On This Day - Mar 11 : Alexander Fleming died

He discovered the antibiotic penicillin, which was the first of many antibiotic drugs that successfully treated a variety of bacterial diseases. This discovery earned him part of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945, shared with Ernst Chain and Howard Florey.
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On This Day - Feb 28 : Linus Pauling was born

He applied quantum mechanics to the study of molecular structure and chemical bonding, earning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. He also introduced the concept of electronegativity.
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On This Day - Feb 22 : Johannes Brønsted was born

Brønsted developed an identical definition of acids and bases simultaneously but independently from English chemist Thomas Lowry in 1923. Acids are recognised by an excess of H⁺ ions, and bases have an excess of OH^- ions.