Nicolas-Jacques Conté was born on this day in 1755. French inventor who devised a method of manufacturing pencil leads by mixing a finely powdered...

 Tadeus Reichstein died on this day in 1996. Swiss chemist who, with Philip S. Hench and Edward C. Kendall, received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for...

  Friedrich Wöhler was born on this day in 1800. German chemist who co-discovered vanadium. Having studied first medicine, then mineralogy, it was chemistry that became...

  Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal died on this day in 1832. French chemist who authored the first book on industrial chemistry. He also coined the name...

   In 1870, America's first asphalt pavement was laid in Newark, N.J. Previously, coal tar was used for many pavements laid in the 1860s. The...

Bertram Borden Boltwood was born on this day in 1870. He was  an American chemist and physicist whose studied the radioactivity of uranium and thorium, and their...

Paul Walden was born on this day in 1863. Latvian chemist who, while teaching at Riga, discovered the Walden inversion, a reversal of stereochemical configuration that...

Russian chemist Sergey Vasilyevich Lebedev was born on this day in 1874. He developed a method for industrial production of synthetic rubber. In 1910, while researching processes...