The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Chemistry,
#6051
Auguste Laurent
1807 - 1853 (46 years)
Auguste Laurent was a French chemist who helped in the founding of organic chemistry with his discoveries of anthracene, phthalic acid, and carbolic acid. He devised a systematic nomenclature for organic chemistry based on structural grouping of atoms within molecules to determine how the molecules combine in organic reactions. He studied under Jean-Baptiste Dumas as a laboratory assistant and worked with Charles Frédéric Gerhardt. He died in Paris from tuberculosis.
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William Hyde Wollaston
1766 - 1828 (62 years)
William Hyde Wollaston was an English chemist and physicist who is famous for discovering the chemical elements palladium and rhodium. He also developed a way to process platinum ore into malleable ingots.
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Theodore William Richards
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Theodore William Richards was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."
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Arthur C. Cope
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Arthur C. Cope was an American organic chemist and member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is credited with the development of several important chemical reactions which bear his name including the Cope elimination and the Cope rearrangement.
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Kikunae Ikeda
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Kikunae Ikeda was a Japanese chemist and Tokyo Imperial University professor of chemistry who, in 1908, uncovered the chemical basis of a taste he named umami. It is one of the five basic tastes along with sweet, bitter, sour and salty.
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Johannes Wislicenus
1835 - 1902 (67 years)
Johannes Wislicenus was a German chemist, most famous for his work in early stereochemistry. Biography The son of the radical Protestant theologian Gustav Wislicenus, Johannes was born on 24 June 1835 in Kleineichstedt in Prussian Saxony, and entered University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1853. In October 1853 he immigrated to the United States with his family. For a brief time he acted as assistant to Harvard chemist Eben Horsford, and in 1855 was appointed lecturer at the Mechanics' Institute in New York. Returning to Europe in 1856, he continued to study chemistry with Wilhelm Heinrich Heintz at the University of Halle.
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Gerhart Jander
1892 - 1961 (69 years)
Gerhart Jander was a German inorganic chemist. His book, now normally only called "Jander-Blasius", on analytical chemistry is still used in German universities. His involvement in the chemical weapon research and close relation to the NSDAP have been uncovered by recent research.
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Meredith Gwynne Evans
1904 - 1952 (48 years)
Meredith Gwynne Evans, FRS was a British physical chemist, who made important theoretical contributions in the study of chemical reaction rates and reaction mechanisms. Together with Henry Eyring and Michael Polanyi, Meredith Gwynne Evans is one of the founders of the transition state theory.
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Georg Ernst Stahl
1659 - 1734 (75 years)
Georg Ernst Stahl was a German chemist, physician and philosopher. He was a supporter of vitalism, and until the late 18th century his works on phlogiston were accepted as an explanation for chemical processes.
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Emil Erlenmeyer
1825 - 1909 (84 years)
Richard August Carl Emil Erlenmeyer , known simply as Emil Erlenmeyer, was a German chemist known for contributing to the early development of the theory of structure, formulating the Erlenmeyer rule, and designing the Erlenmeyer flask, a type of specialized flask, ubiquitous in chemistry laboratories, which is named after him.
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Max Volmer
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Max Volmer was a German physical chemist, who made important contributions in electrochemistry, in particular on electrode kinetics. He co-developed the Butler–Volmer equation. Volmer held the chair and directorship of the Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry Institute of the Technische Hochschule Berlin, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After World War II, he went to the Soviet Union, where he headed a design bureau for the production of heavy water. Upon his return to East Germany ten years later, he became a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and was president of the East German ...
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Andrés Manuel del Río
1764 - 1849 (85 years)
Andrés Manuel del Río y Fernández was a Spanish scientist, naturalist and engineer, nationalized Mexican, who discovered compounds of vanadium in 1801. He proposed that the element be given the name panchromium, or later, erythronium, but his discovery was not credited at the time, and his names were not used.
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Walter Reppe
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Walter Julius Reppe was a German chemist. He is notable for his contributions to the chemistry of acetylene. Education and career Walter Reppe began his study of the natural sciences University of Jena in 1911. Interrupted by the First World War, he obtained his doctorate in Munich in 1920.
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Adolph Strecker
1822 - 1871 (49 years)
Adolph Strecker was a German chemist who is remembered primarily for his work with amino acids. Life and work Strecker was born in Darmstadt, the son of Friedrich Ludwig Strecker, an archivist working for the hessian Grand Duke, and Henriette Amalie Johannette Koch. Adolph Strecker attended school in Darmstadt until 1838 when he changed to the higher Gewerbeschule. After receiving his abitur in 1840, Strecker began studying science at the University of Giessen, where Justus Liebig was a professor. In August 1842, Strecker received his PhD and began teaching at a realschule in Darmstadt. He re...
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Martin Heinrich Klaproth
1743 - 1817 (74 years)
Martin Heinrich Klaproth was a German chemist. He trained and worked for much of his life as an apothecary, moving in later life to the university. His shop became the second-largest apothecary in Berlin, and the most productive artisanal chemical research center in Europe.
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Warren K. Lewis
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
Warren Kendall Lewis was an MIT professor who has been called the father of modern chemical engineering. He co-authored an early major textbook on the subject which essentially introduced the concept of unit operations. He also co-developed the Houdry process under contract to The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey into modern fluid catalytic cracking with Edwin R. Gilliland, another MIT professor.
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Jan Baptist van Helmont
1577 - 1644 (67 years)
Jan Baptist van Helmont was a chemist, physiologist, and physician from Brussels. He worked during the years just after Paracelsus and the rise of iatrochemistry, and is sometimes considered to be "the founder of pneumatic chemistry". Van Helmont is remembered today largely for his 5-year willow tree experiment, his introduction of the word "gas" into the vocabulary of science, and his ideas on spontaneous generation.
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Angelo Angeli
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
Angelo Angeli was an Italian chemist. Angeli's salt and the Angeli–Rimini reaction are named after him. Scientific career Angeli studied in Padua, where he met the chemist Giacomo Luigi Ciamician. When Ciamician moved to a new appointment in Bologna, he chose Angeli to work as his assistant, even before Angeli had graduated. In 1891, Angeli was awarded his doctorate in chemistry at Bologna. In 1893, he became a lecturer in Bologna, and in 1895 he became a professor. In 1894, he worked briefly in Munich with Adolf von Baeyer, learning medicinal chemistry. In 1897, he moved to the University of...
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Lars Fredrik Nilson
1840 - 1899 (59 years)
Lars Fredrik Nilson was a Swedish chemist, professor at Uppsala University, and later Director of the Agricultural Chemical Experiment Station at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Stockholm.
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Harmon Northrop Morse
1848 - 1920 (72 years)
Harmon Northrop Morse was an American chemist. Today he is known as the first to have synthesized paracetamol, but this substance only became widely used as a drug decades after Morse's death. In the first half of the 20th century he was best known for his study of osmotic pressure, for which he was awarded the Avogadro Medal in 1916. The Morse equation for estimating osmotic pressure is named after him.
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Joseph Joshua Weiss
1905 - 1972 (67 years)
Joseph Joshua Weiss was a Jewish-Austrian chemist and Professor at the Newcastle University. He was a pioneer in the field of radiation chemistry and photochemistry. Education and career Weiss was born in 1905 in Austria. He had obtained a Dipl.Ing. degree in the Technische Hochschule in Vienna. He entered the Textile Institute at Sorau in 1928 and was the head of the chemistry department there. He left his post two years later to become an assistant to the German chemist Fritz Haber at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Elektrochemistry in Berlin. Together they discovered the Haber–Weiss reaction.
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Lev Pisarzhevsky
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Lev Vladimirovich Pisarzhevsky was a Ukrainian Soviet chemist who studied peroxides, peracids, and solutionss. His contribution to the theory of catalysis is best known for his attempt to relate the catalytic properties of solids to their electronic properties.
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Eugen Bamberger
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Eugen Bamberger was a German chemist and discoverer of the Bamberger rearrangement. Life and achievements Bamberger started studying medicine in 1875 at the University of Berlin, but changed subjects and university after one year, starting his studies of science at the University of Heidelberg in 1876. He returned to Berlin in the same year and focused on chemistry. He received his PhD for work with August Wilhelm von Hofmann in Berlin and became assistant of Karl Friedrich August Rammelsberg at Charlottenburg and in 1883 of Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich, where, after his hab...
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Albin Haller
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Albin Haller was a French chemist. Haller founded the École Nationale Supérieure des Industries Chimiques in Nancy and in 1917 won the Davy Medal of the Royal Society "On the ground of his important researches in the domain of organic chemistry". Appointed to the French Academy of Sciences in 1900, he served as its president beginning in 1923. He was also a member of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine.
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Lev Chugaev
1873 - 1922 (49 years)
Lev Aleksandrovich Chugaev was a chemist from the Russian Empire. At the height of his career, he was professor of chemistry at the University of Petersburg, being the successor to Dmitri Mendeleev. He was active in the fields of inorganic chemistry, especially platinum group complexes, as well as organic chemistry. He is also known as Leo Aleksandrovich Tschugaeff or Tschugaev.
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Adolf Windaus
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus was a German chemist who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928 for his work on sterols and their relation to vitamins. He was the doctoral advisor of Adolf Butenandt who also won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1939.
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Germain Henri Hess
1802 - 1850 (48 years)
Germain Henri Hess was a Swiss-Russian chemist and doctor who formulated Hess's law, an early principle of thermochemistry. Early life and education Hess was born on 7 August 1802 in Geneva, Switzerland. His father was an artist and in 1805 moved the family to Russia to work as a tutor to a rich family. His Swiss-born mother was a tutor as well and Hess had the benefit of learning German and French at home. In 1817, his family moved to Dorpat, Russian Empire , where he went to a private school for two years, and then to Dorpat Gymnasium, which he finished in 1822. In autumn of the same year Hess studied medicine at the University of Dorpat.
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Edward Calvin Kendall
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Edward Calvin Kendall was an American chemist. In 1950, Kendall was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Swiss chemist Tadeusz Reichstein and Mayo Clinic physician Philip S. Hench, for their work with the hormones of the adrenal gland. Kendall did not only focus on the adrenal glands, he was also responsible for the isolation of thyroxine, a hormone of the thyroid gland and worked with the team that crystallized glutathione and identified its chemical structure.
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Morris Travers
1872 - 1961 (89 years)
Morris William Travers, FRS was an English chemist who worked with Sir William Ramsay in the discovery of xenon, neon and krypton. His work on several of the rare gases earned him the name Rare Gas Travers in scientific circles. He was the founding director of the Indian Institute of Science.
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Ludwig Wolff
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Ludwig Wolff , born in Neustadt in Palatinate, was a German chemist. He studied chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he received his Ph.D. from Rudolph Fittig in 1882. He became Professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Jena in 1891 and held this position till his death in 1919. In 1911 he published a new reaction now known as the Wolff-Kishner reduction. His name is also associated with the chemical reaction known as the Wolff rearrangement .
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Thomas Graham
1805 - 1869 (64 years)
Thomas Graham was a Scottish chemist known for his pioneering work in dialysis and the diffusion of gases. He is regarded as one of the founders of colloid chemistry. Life Graham was born in Glasgow,Scotland and was educated at the High School of Glasgow. Graham's father was a successful textile manufacturer, and wanted his son to enter into the Church of Scotland. Instead, defying his father's wishes, Graham became a student at the University of Glasgow in 1819. There he developed a strong interest in chemistry, studying under Professor Thomas Thomson, who was impressed and influenced by the young man.
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Siegmund Gabriel
1851 - 1924 (73 years)
Siegmund Gabriel was a German chemist. Scientific career Siegmund Gabriel began studying chemistry at the University of Berlin in 1871. He continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1872 with Professor Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. In 1874, he received his doctorate and then returned to Berlin. He began teaching as an assistant, initially in the inorganic chemistry department, before becoming an associate professor in 1886. Gabriel later turned to organic chemistry in his own research.
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Peter Waage
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Peter Waage was a Norwegian chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Kristiania. Along with his brother-in-law Cato Maximilian Guldberg, he co-discovered and developed the law of mass action between 1864 and 1879.
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Moses Gomberg
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Moses Gomberg was a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Chemical Society.
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Ludwig Knorr
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Ludwig Knorr was a German chemist. Together with Carl Paal, he discovered the Paal–Knorr synthesis, and the Knorr quinoline synthesis and Knorr pyrrole synthesis are also named after him. The synthesis in 1883 of the analgesic drug antipyrine, now called phenazone, was a commercial success. Antipyrine was the first synthetic drug and the most widely used drug until it was replaced by Aspirin in the early 20th century.
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Hermann Irving Schlesinger
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Hermann Irving Schlesinger was an American inorganic chemist, working in boron chemistry. He and Herbert C. Brown discovered sodium borohydride in 1940 and both were involved in the further development of borohydride chemistry.
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Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner
1783 - 1857 (74 years)
Karl Wilhelm Gottlob Kastner was a German chemist, natural scientist and a professor of physics and chemistry. Biography Kastner received his doctorate in 1805 under the guidance of Johann Göttling and began lecturing at the University of Jena. He moved on to become professor at the University of Halle in 1812. In 1818 he relocated to the University of Bonn, where he would mentor famous chemist Justus Liebig. He then moved on to the University of Erlangen in the summer of 1821, where he would remain for the rest of his professional life.
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Walter Noddack
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Walter Noddack was a German chemist. He, Ida Tacke , and Otto Berg reported the discovery of element 43 and element 75 in 1925. Rhenium They named element 75 rhenium . Rhenium was the last element to be discovered having a stable isotope. The existence of a yet undiscovered element at this position in the periodic table had been predicted by Henry Moseley in 1914. In 1925 they reported that they detected the element in platinum ore and in the mineral columbite. They also found rhenium in gadolinite and molybdenite. In 1928 they were able to extract 1 g of the element by processing 660 kg of molybdenite.
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William Cullen
1710 - 1790 (80 years)
William Cullen was a Scottish physician, chemist and agriculturalist, and professor at the Edinburgh Medical School. Cullen was a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment: He was David Hume's physician, and was friends with Joseph Black, Henry Home, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and Adam Smith, among others.
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Bernard Courtois
1777 - 1838 (61 years)
Bernard Courtois, also spelled Barnard Courtois, was a French chemist credited with first isolating iodine, making early photography possible. By 1811 the Napoleonic Wars had made the government-controlled saltpeter business taper off since there was by then a shortage of wood ashes with which potassium nitrate was made. As an alternative, the needed potassium nitrate was derived from seaweed that was abundant on the Normandy and Brittany shores. The seaweed also had another, yet undiscovered, important chemical. One day towards the end of 1811 while Courtois was isolating sodium and potassium compounds from seaweed ash, he discovered iodine after he added sulfuric acid to the seaweed ash.
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Wilhelm Groth
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Wilhelm Groth was a German physical chemist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; his main activity was the development of centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. After the war, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Hamburg. In 1950, he became director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Bonn. He was a principal in the 1956 shipment of three centrifuges for uranium enrichment to Brazil.
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Carl Shipp Marvel
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Carl Shipp "Speed" Marvel was an American chemist who specialized in polymer chemistry. He made important contributions to U.S. synthetic rubber program during World War II, and later worked at developing polybenzimidazoles, temperature-resistant polymers that are used in the aerospace industry, in fire-fighting equipment, and as a replacement for asbestos. He has been described as "one of the world's outstanding organic chemists" and received numerous awards, including the 1956 Priestley Medal and the 1986 National Medal of Science, presented by President Ronald Reagan.
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Victor Henri
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Victor Henri was a French-Russian physical chemist and physiologist. He was born in Marseilles as a son of Russian parents. He is known mainly as an early pioneer in enzyme kinetics. He published more than 500 papers in a variety of disciplines including biochemistry, physical chemistry, psychology, and physiology. Aleksey Krylov was his half-brother.
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Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge
1794 - 1867 (73 years)
Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was a German analytical chemist. Runge identified the mydriatic effects of belladonna extract, identified caffeine, and discovered the first coal tar dye . Early life Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge was born near Hamburg on 8 February 1794. From a young age, Runge conducted chemical experiments, serendipitously identifying the mydriatic effects of belladonna extract.
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Max Bergmann
1886 - 1944 (58 years)
Max Bergmann was a Jewish-German biochemist. Together with Leonidas Zervas, the discoverer of the group, they were the first to use the carboxybenzyl protecting group for the synthesis of oligopeptides.
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Per Teodor Cleve
1840 - 1905 (65 years)
Per Teodor Cleve was a Swedish chemist, biologist, mineralogist and oceanographer. He is best known for his discovery of the chemical elements holmium and thulium. Born in Stockholm in 1840, Cleve earned his BSc and PhD from Uppsala University in 1863 and 1868, respectively. After receiving his PhD, he became an assistant professor of chemistry at the university. He later became professor of general and agricultural chemistry. In 1874 he theorised that didymium was in fact two elements; this theory was confirmed in 1885 when Carl Auer von Welsbach discovered neodymium and praseodymium.
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Boris Nikolsky
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Boris Petrovich Nikolsky , , was a Soviet chemist who played a crucial role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. Besides his work on the plutonium chemistry, Nikolsky did a pioneering work in ion exchanges applications in radiochemistry and physical chemistry, and was a professor of chemistry at the Leningrad University . He academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
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Karl von Auwers
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Karl Friedrich von Auwers was a German chemist, and was the academic adviser of both Karl Ziegler and Georg Wittig at the University of Marburg. Life Karl Friedrich von Auwers was born the son of the renowned astronomer Arthur Auwers on in Gotha, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. He studied at first at the University of Heidelberg and later with August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1885. After one further year with Hofmann he joined the group of Victor Meyer at the University of Göttingen and later at the University of Heidelberg. He stayed at Heidelberg until he became professor at the University of Greifswald in 1900.
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Farrington Daniels
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Farrington Daniels was an American physical chemist who is considered one of the pioneers of the modern direct use of solar energy. Biography Daniels was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 8, 1889. Daniels began day school in 1895 at the Kenwood School and then on to Douglas School. As a boy, he was fascinated with Thomas Edison, Samuel F. B. Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and John Charles Fields. He decided early that he wanted to be an electrician and inventor. He attended Central and East Side high schools. By this point he liked chemistry and physics, but equally enjoyed "Manual Train...
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Frank C. Whitmore
1887 - 1947 (60 years)
Frank Clifford Whitmore , nicknamed "Rocky", was a prominent chemist who submitted significant evidence for the existence of carbocation mechanisms in organic chemistry. He was born in 1887 in the town of North Attleborough, Massachusetts.
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