DEVELOPING AND DESIGNING NEW CHEMICALS AND MATERIALS - Chemistry: Notable Research and Discoveries - page 31

will find enormous use in railroads, shipbuilding,
construction, and other vital components of the
Industrial Revolution.

19 Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev (1834-1907)

organizes the chemical elements into a periodic
table.

190 Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland (1863-

1944) makes Bakelite, the first synthetic (artificial)
plastic.

191-1 German physicist Max von Laue (1879-1960) and

British scientists Sir William Henry Bragg (1862-
1942) and his son, Sir William Lawrence Bragg
(1890-1971), discover how to use X-ray diffraction
to analyze the structure of molecules.

19 Russell Games Slayter, a researcher at the Ameri-

can company Owens Corning, perfects a technique
to produce fiberglass.

19 Scientists at ASEA, a Swedish company, create dia-

monds by using extremely high pressure. A year
later, Tracy Hall, a scientist at the American com-
pany General Electric, develops a reliable technique
to make diamonds (and is often given the credit
for generating the first artificial diamond, since the
work of the Swedish researchers was not reported
until much later).

19 Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, and

their colleagues discover a different form of car-
bon, C 60 , also known as buckminsterfullerene or
“buckyball.”

1990s Combinatorial chemistry comes into use as a tech-

nique to produce a large number of compounds
quickly and efficiently.