This Month in Chemistry

Antoine Henri Becquerel was a physicist, Nobel laureate, and the discoverer of radioactivity. He received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SI unit for radioactivity, the becquerel (Bq), is named after him. Becquerel was born in Paris into a family which produced four generations of scientists: Becquerel’s grandfather, and son. He studied engineering. In 1890 he married Louise Désirée Lorieux. In 1892, he became the third …

Germanium (Ge) is a silvery semi-metal element used in semiconductors. It is used as a transistor in thousands of types of electronics. It is a lustrous, hard, grayish-white metalloid in the carbon group, chemically similar to its group neighbors tin and silicon. Purified germanium is a semiconductor, with an appearance most similar to elemental silicon. Because very few minerals contain it …

New Zealand-born British physicist who became known as the father of chemist and nuclear physics,  succeeded in splitting the atom January 3, 1919. By bombarding nitrogen (N) atoms with alpha particles, he broke down the nucleus of the nitrogen atoms, releasing hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) atoms in the process. As a result he became the first true alchemist.  In early work he discovered …

The United States of America tested their first hydrogen bomb, On November 1, 1952, at full scale in the “Ivy Mike” shot at an island in the Enewetak Atoll, with a yield of 10.4 megatons (over 450 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II, and approximately the same amount of energy as ten million tons of …

Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received theNobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in …

Russian-German physical chemist Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was born on September 2, in 1853 He was one of the founders of classical physical chemistry. In particular, Ostwald was a pioneer of electrochemistry and chemical dynamics. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibrium, and reaction velocities. Ostwald is usually credited with inventing the Ostwald …

Victor Grignard, in full François-Auguste-Victor Grignard (May 6, 1871 in Cherbourg – December 13, 1935 in Lyon) was a Nobel Prize-winning French chemist. In 1898, while a student under Philippe Barbier at Lyon, Grignard began his prize winning work with a study of the alkylzinc compounds developed earlier bySir Edward Frankland. It was Barbier who had Grignard repeat some experiments on …

The non-stick coating for cookware Teflon was invented on this day in 1938 Teflon, which is the trade name for polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), was first made by American chemist Roy Plunkett by accident whilst working for DuPont. Teflon’s inert nature and extreme slipperiness has led to it being used in many applications, including non-stick saucepans.         Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is a …