https://www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/building-periodic-table/
Timelines of Agriculture, Biology, Chemistry, Invention, Medicine
Timeline of Chemistry
1827
William Prout classifies biomolecules into their modern groupings: carbohydrates, proteins and lipids.
1855
Benjamin Silliman, Jr. pioneers methods of petroleum cracking, which makes the entire modern petrochemical industry possible.
1856
William Henry Perkin synthesizes Perkin's mauve, the first synthetic dye. Created as an accidental byproduct of an attempt to create quinine from coal tar. This discovery is the foundation of the dye synthesis industry, one of the earliest successful chemical industries.
1857
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz proposes that carbon is tetravalent, or forms exactly four chemical bonds.
1859–1860
Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen lay the foundations of spectroscopy as a means of chemical analysis, which lead them to the discovery of caesium and rubidium. Other workers soon used the same technique to discover indium, thallium, and helium.
1862
Alexander Parkes exhibits Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery formed the foundation of the modern plastics industry.
1865
Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, based partially on the work of Loschmidt and others, establishes structure of benzene as a six carbon ring with alternating single and double bonds.
1865
Adolf von Baeyer begins work on indigo dye, a milestone in modern industrial organic chemistry which revolutionizes the dye industry.
Mendeleev's 1869 Periodic table
1869
Dmitri Mendeleev publishes the first modern periodic table, with the 66 known elements organized by atomic weights. The strength of his table was its ability to accurately predict the properties of as-yet unknown elements.
1883
Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes.
1884
Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff publishes Études de Dynamique chimique, a seminal study on chemical kinetics.
1884
Hermann Emil Fischer proposes structure of purine, a key structure in many biomolecules, which he later synthesized in 1898. Also begins work on the chemistry of glucose and related sugars.
1897
J. J. Thomson discovers the electron using the cathode ray tube.
1898
Wilhelm Wien demonstrates that canal rays (streams of positive ions) can be deflected by magnetic fields, and that the amount of deflection is proportional to the mass-to-charge ratio. This discovery would lead to the analytical technique known as mass spectrometry.
1898
Maria Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie isolate radium and polonium from pitchblende.
c. 1900
Ernest Rutherford discovers the source of radioactivity as decaying atoms; coins terms for various types of radiation.
1905
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch develop the Haber process for making ammonia from its elements, a milestone in industrial chemistry with deep consequences in agriculture.
1905
Albert Einstein explains Brownian motion in a way that definitively proves atomic theory.
1907
Leo Hendrik Baekeland invents bakelite, one of the first commercially successful plastics.
Quantum chemistry & chemical thermodynamics
1915-4-22 Chlorine gas, 2nd Battle of Ypres ..
1935
Wallace Carothers leads a team of chemists at DuPont who invent nylon, one of the most commercially successful synthetic polymers in history.
How Nylon Was Discovered - Ri > .
1937
Eugene Houdry develops a method of industrial scale catalytic cracking of petroleum, leading to the development of the first modern oil refinery.
1939
Linus Pauling publishes The Nature of the Chemical Bond, a compilation of a decades worth of work on chemical bonding. It is one of the most important modern chemical texts. It explains hybridization theory, covalent bonding and ionic bonding as explained through electronegativity, and resonance as a means to explain, among other things, the structure of benzene.
Nuclear weapons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemistry
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Vulcanized Rubber discovered purely by accident - 2 bit > .
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NEOPRENE & NYLON
In 1931, DuPont started to manufacture neoprene, a synthetic rubber created by Carothers' lab. The research team then turned their efforts towards a synthetic fiber that could replace silk. Japan was the United States' main source of silk, and trade relations between the two countries were breaking apart.
By 1934, Wallace Carothers had made significant steps toward creating a synthetic silk by combining the chemicals amine, hexamethylene diamine and adipic acid to create a new fiber formed by the polymerizing process and known as a condensation reaction. In a condensation reaction, individual molecules join with water as a byproduct.
Wallace Carothers refined the process (since the water produced by the reaction was dripping back into the mixture and weakening the fibers) by adjusting the equipment so that the water was distilled and removed from the process making for stronger fibers.
https://www.thoughtco.com/wallace-carothers-history-of-nylon-1992197
