California State University Fresno. 93740
August 1,1769 Benjamin Rush is unanimously appointed Professor of Chemistry a t the College of Philadelphia (now the University ofPennsylvania), thus becoming the first incumbent of an American chair devoted exclusively to chemistry. August 2,1939 In a letter considered "one of the most consequential communications in recorded history" Albert Einstein brings the military potential of atomic energy to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. August 6,1776 The Continental Congress "resolved that a member he added to the committee appointed to enquire into, and remedy, the defect of the [gunlpowder made a t the [Philadelphia] mills; The member chosen, Dr. [Benjamin] Rush." August 7,1969 George C. Pimentel announces that instruments on Mariner 7 had detected evidence of CHI and NH3-two essential substances for life-as the spacecraft flew near Mars. August 18,1942 Burris B. Cunningham i n d L. B. Werner isolate one microgram of plutonium, the first sight of a synthetic element and the first isolation of a weighahle amount of an
470 / Journal of Chemical Education
artificially produced isotope. August 18,1969 A squadron of planes from Roosevelt Roads Naval Base in Puerto Rico dump nearly 1,000lhs. of AgI to "seed hurricane Debbie causing moisture in the warm cloud walls of the storm to freeze and plunge into the ocean. August 21,1893 World's Chemical Congress opens a t the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. August 23,1798 "Objections to the Antiphlogistic Doctrine of Water; by Dr. Priestley, in a Letter to Dr. Mitchill, Aug. 23, 1798" appears in the Medical Repository, 2,166(1799). August 23,1943 Streptomycin is isolated by Dr. Selman A. Waksman. August 24,1811 An article on the analysis of mineral water from a spring in Bordentown, New Jersey, the first to be submitted by the newly organized Columbian Chemical Society, appears in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania newspaper Aurora. August i9,1878 Nature (18, 475 (1878)) publishes the American chemist Thomas Sterry Hunt's lecture on celestial chemistry before the British Association for the Advancement of Science a t Dublin. \
