Important Chemistry Events and Discoveries

  • Steam Engine

    Steam Engine
    Thomas Savery was an English military engineer and inventor who in 1698, patented the first crude steam engine.
  • Democritus

    Democritus
    Democritus was a philosopher from ancient Greece. He live from 460-370 B.C. He was the first person propose the idea that matter was not infinitely divisable. He beleived that matter was made up of individual particles called atomos.
  • Aristotle

    Aristotle
    Aristotle was one on the most influential Greek philosophers. (384-322) He did not beleive in the atom, and his beleifs of nature kept people from beleiving in atoms for more than 2,000 years.
  • John Dalton

    John Dalton
    John Dalton(1766-1844) marked the begging of the devolpment of modern atomic therory. He beleived that all matter is composed of extremly small particles called atoms, all atoms of a given element are identical, atoms cannot be created, divided or destroyed, different atoms combine in simple whole number ratios to form compounds, and that atoms are seperated, combined, or rearranged in a chemical reaction.
  • The Automobile

    The Automobile
    the very first self-propelled road vehicle was invented by French mechanic, Nicolas Joseph Cugnot.
  • Antonie Lavosier

    Antonie Lavosier
    Ofton known as the father of chemistry, the work of Antonie laid the groundwork for the atomic theory. He also produced the first table of elements which contained a large number of substances that modern chemists would agree should be classifies as elements.
  • Cotton Gin

    Cotton Gin
    Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin on March 14, 1794. The cotton gin is a machine that separates seeds, hulls and other unwanted materials from cotton after it has been picked.
  • Joseph Proust

    Joseph Proust
    Proust was a chemical annalist whoproposed the the Law of Constant Composition. Proust based his work on the study of copper carbonate reactions performed in the laboratory.He studied the two tin oxides and the two iron sulfides, proving that had different compositions and that there were no substances with intermediate composition.
  • The Light Bulb

    The Light Bulb
    In 1809, Humphry Davy, an English chemist, invented the first electric light.
  • Amadeo Avagadro

    Amadeo Avagadro
    Best known for Avogadro's Law that states under the same conditions of temperature and pressure equal volumes of all gases contain the same number of smallest particles or molecules, whether those particles consist of single atoms or are composed of two or more atoms of the same or different kinds. The number of particles in a mole is known as "Avogadro's Number"
  • The Camera

    The Camera
    Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first photographic image with a camera obscura, however, the image required eight hours of light exposure and later faded.
  • The Telephone

    The Telephone
    The telephone was invented by Alexander Grahm Bell. he telephone is an instrument that converts voice and sound signals into electrical impulses for transmission by wire to a different location, where another telephone receives the electrical impulses and turns them back into recognizable sounds.
  • William Crooks

    William Crooks
    Crooks was a British physicist and chemist. Crookes used vacuum tubes to investigate cathode rays. He invented his own vacuum tube, the Crookes tube. He discovered that the rays made the sides of the glass tube fluoresce. He also showed that they travelled in straight lines and could be deflected by a magnetic field. Crookes invented the spinthariscope, that measured alpha radiation using light flashes caused by these charged particles. He also discovered thallium.
  • Television

    Television
    Paul Nipkow invented the first television when he sent images over wires using a rotating metal disk technology with 18 lines of resolution. Television then evolved along two paths, mechanical based on Nipkow's rotating disks, and electronic based on the cathode ray tube.
  • Henri Becquerel

    Henri Becquerel
    Henri Becquerel is the discoverer of radioactivity.
  • J. J. Thomson

    J. J. Thomson
    Thomson wasa very prominent physicist. the most brilliant work of his life was an original study of cathode rays culminating in the discovery of the electron, which was announced during the course of his evening lecture to the Royal Institution on Friday, April 30, 1897. He also discovered a way to seperatea different kinds of atoms and molecules by the use of positive rays.
  • Max Planck

    Max Planck
    Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist who is widely regarded as one of the most significant scientists in history. He developed a simple but revolutionary concept that was to become the foundation of a new way of looking at the world, called quantum theory.
  • Madame Curie

    Madame Curie
    Marie Curie is known for her pioneering work in radiation research. Marie Curie first coined the term "radioactivity". She was key in developing methods for quantitatively measuring radioactivity and for discovering its effect on living cells.
  • Albert Einstein

    Albert Einstein
    Einstein is most noted for his theory of relativity or E=mc².
  • Robert Millikan

    Robert Millikan
    Robert had many major discoveries. One was determination of the charge carried by an electron in 1910, thus demonstrating the atomic structure of electricity. Next, he verified experimentally Einstein's photoelectric equation, and made the first direct photoelectric determination of Planck's constant. From 1920-1930, his research of ultra-violet radiation expanded the spectrum.
  • Henry Mosely

    Henry Mosely
    Henry Moseley is known for his establishment of truly scientific basis of the Periodic Table of the Elements by sorting chemical elements in the order of their atomic numbers.
  • Ernest Ruthoford

    Ernest Ruthoford
    Ernest Rutoford did a lot of stuff in his lifetime. In 1920 he predicted the existence of the neutron. He became the worlds forst successful alchemist in 1917 when he changed nitrogen into oxygen and split the atom. In 1911 Ernest announced the nuclear model of the atom. In 1898 Ern discovers rays from radioactive materials are of two main types, which he names alpha and beta. In1899 Discovers a radioactive gas, later to be named radon.
  • Niels Bohr

    Niels Bohr
    Bohr’s most well known and important contribution was his work on the theory of the structure of the Atomic Model. Bohr proposed that “electrons travel only in certain successively larger orbits. He suggested that the outer orbits could hold more electrons than the outer orbits could hold more electrons than the inner ones, and that these outer orbits determine the atom's chemical properties. It was for his atomic model that he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1922.
  • Louis De Broglie

    Louis De Broglie
    French quantum physicist Louis de Broglie introduced his theory of particle-wave duality in 1924. In his time, the wave and particle interpretations of light and matter were seen as being at odds with one another, but de Broglie suggested that these seemingly different characteristics were instead the same behavior observed from different perspectives and that particles can behave like waves and that waves can behave like particles.
  • Erwin Schrodinger

    Erwin Schrodinger
    Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933, for his 1926 introduction of Schrödinger's wave, the mathematical equation of wave mechanics that is still the most widely used piece of mathematics in modern quantum theory. It posits a non-relativistic wave equation that governs how electrons behave within the hydrogen atom.
  • Werner Heisenberg

    Werner Heisenberg
    Werner Heisenberg is best known for his uncertainty principal which states that it is impossible to accurately measure both position and momentum (energy and time) concurrently, and that the more precisely we know an object's position the less precisely we can know its momentum, and vice versa.
  • James Chadwick

    James Chadwick
    In 1932, Chadwick made a fundamental discovery in the domain of nuclear science when he proved the existence of neutrons - elementary particles devoid of any electrical charge.
  • Ball Point Pens

    Ball Point Pens
    The ball-point pen was invented by Ladislo Biro in 1938. A patent battle erupted; learn how Parker and Bic won the war.
  • Penicillin

    Penicillin
    Penicillin was invented by Alexander Fleming, John Sheehan, Andrew J Moyer. Penicillin is one of the earliest discovered and widely used antibiotic agents, derived from the Penicillium mold.
  • Airbags

    In 1973, the General Motors research team invented the first car safety air bags that were first offered in the 1973 model Chevrolet as an option.