Felix Hoffmann 's father suffered from a painful case of rheumatism, and he asked his son to find him a medicine that didn't have the negative side effects of sodium salicylate, the drug commonly prescribed at the time for that and other ailments. After all, Felix was a chemist with Friedrich Bayer Company. Felix researched decades of other scientists' experiments and conducted many of his own in an effort to grant his father's request. Then, on August 10, 1897, he made his first sample of...

The name Constantin Fahlberg is by no means a household name any more. But it ought to be. Constantin Fahlberg, chemist Fahlberg was born in Tambov in central Russia in 1850. He developed an early interest in chemistry and later moved to the United States, where he got a job as a chemist at Johns Hopkins University doing chemical research. One evening in 1878, while in his lab doing research, he got so involved in it that he suddenly realized that he was late for supper. He rushed from the...

World War II started out as an uphill battle for the United States. We were unprepared. Our allies had been, or were on the verge of being, defeated by the Axis juggernaut - the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese warmongers in the Pacific. Once we were in the war, the news was bad as we lost one possession after another in the early months of the war. We were strictly on the defensive, never on the offensive. Then came a bit of good news that gave us a ray of hope. We had a hero. Edward "Butch"...