In 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev pinned a handwritten table of elements to a classroom wall — a bold guess that predicted elements not yet discovered and changed chemistry forever.
People shape ideas. Learning about the inventors and experimenters behind major advances helps us see why certain methods work, how materials originate, and why some discoveries led to new medicines or manufacturing processes.
This article profiles seven famous inorganic chemists and explains how each discovery reshaped science, industry, and everyday life. You’ll meet early classifiers and electrochemists, thinkers who reimagined bonding, and 20th-century catalyst developers whose work still underpins pharmaceuticals and materials.
Foundations: How coordination and classification changed chemistry
The next three scientists established core concepts—coordination chemistry and periodic classification—that made synthesis predictable and materials design systematic. Their work underlies modern drug complexes, catalysts, and the choice of elements in engineering applications.
1. Alfred Werner — Coordination chemistry and the structure of complexes
Alfred Werner introduced coordination theory, explaining how metal centers bind ligands in defined geometries and why certain isomers exist. His late 1890s experiments on cobalt ammine complexes resolved puzzling stereoisomerism and led to his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1913.
Werner’s notation of coordination numbers and spatial arrangements allowed chemists to predict the structure of metal complexes. That predictivity is visible in clinical drugs like cisplatin (a platinum-based therapy used for ovarian and testicular cancers) and in transition-metal catalysts employed in industrial hydrogenation and fine-chemical synthesis.
Today his ideas guide materials design and bioinorganic chemistry, from designing metal-containing enzymes mimics to tailoring catalysts for greener processes.
2. Dmitri Mendeleev — The periodic table and predictive chemistry
Mendeleev published his periodic table in 1869, arranging elements by atomic weight and chemical behavior and leaving intentional gaps for undiscovered elements. He predicted properties for several missing elements, including “eka-silicon,” which matched germanium when Clemens Winkler isolated it in 1886.
By organizing elements into a coherent system, Mendeleev transformed chemistry from a catalog of facts into a predictive science. Periodic trends now guide selection of alloys, catalysts, and semiconductor dopants, and they help researchers anticipate reactivity when designing new materials or fertilizers that rely on phosphorus and potassium chemistry.
3. Humphry Davy — Isolating elements and electrochemistry
Humphry Davy pioneered electrochemical methods to isolate elements, famously producing potassium and sodium in 1807 by passing current through molten salts. He also invented the Davy lamp, introduced around 1815, which reduced explosions in coal mines by providing a safer flame enclosure.
Davy’s experiments laid experimental groundwork for large-scale electrolysis processes that later enabled aluminum production and modern metal refining. His work linked laboratory discovery with practical industry, foreshadowing electrochemical manufacturing used across the chemical sector.
Bonding and radioactivity: New views on atoms and elements
These chemists rethought how atoms bond and showed that elements could emit energy, changing how chemists predict reactivity and how clinicians treat disease. The following two figures connected atomic ideas to practical chemistry and medicine.
4. Marie Curie — Radioactivity, polonium, and radium
Marie Curie reported the isolation of polonium and radium in 1898 and helped establish radioactivity as an element-based phenomenon. She shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her work isolating radium.
Curie’s radioisotopes found early medical use when she organized mobile X-ray vans during World War I (1914–18). Radioactivity later enabled radiotherapy for cancer, though radium’s early misuse taught the field hard safety lessons and led to safer, targeted isotopes in medicine.
Her legacy is mixed but profound: new diagnostics and treatments trace back to those first isolations and measurements of radioactive decay.
5. Gilbert N. Lewis — The electron pair and acid-base concepts
In his 1916 paper “The Atom and the Molecule,” Gilbert N. Lewis introduced electron-pair bonding and the diagrammatic Lewis structures still taught in classrooms. He broadened acid-base theory by defining Lewis acids and bases in terms of electron-pair acceptance or donation.
Concrete examples include BF3 as a Lewis acid and NH3 as a Lewis base. That simple redefinition expanded chemists’ toolkit for understanding reactivity, guiding ligand design for metal complexes, catalyst selection, and synthesis planning in both inorganic and organic chemistry.
Modern breakthroughs: Bonding theories and practical catalysts
The next two chemists turned bonding concepts into quantitative tools and practical catalysts that industry and pharma still use, producing outcomes measured in dozens to millions of doses or metric tons annually. Their theories and reagents are central to modern materials and drug routes.
6. Linus Pauling — Electronegativity and the nature of the chemical bond
Linus Pauling introduced a quantitative electronegativity scale in work first published in 1932 and synthesized these ideas in his influential book The Nature of the Chemical Bond. The Pauling scale assigns fluorine the highest value of 4.0, which helps predict bond polarity and ionic character.
For example, the large electronegativity difference between sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl) explains the ionic bonding in NaCl. Pauling’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry came in 1954, and his concepts still guide materials selection in ceramics, semiconductors, and alloy design.
7. Robert H. Grubbs — Practical organometallic catalysts for synthesis
Robert H. Grubbs shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005 for developing practical metathesis catalysts that enable efficient bond formation in organic synthesis. His first- and second-generation Grubbs catalysts (early 1990s) made ring-closing metathesis user-friendly and robust for scale-up.
Metathesis shortens routes to active pharmaceutical ingredients and creates novel polymer architectures with less waste. Pharmaceutical routes that once required multiple steps can be condensed, saving time and materials and enabling production at scale for medicines and specialty polymers.
Summary
These seven figures show how frameworks, experiments, and catalysts changed chemistry and industry.
- Systematic prediction matters: Mendeleev’s 1869 table let chemists predict elements (e.g., eka‑silicon → germanium, 1886) and still informs material selection.
- Coordination chemistry led to lifesaving drugs: Werner’s coordination theory (Nobel 1913) underpins complexes like cisplatin used in oncology.
- Atomic and bonding theories reshaped practice: from Davy’s electrolysis of sodium and potassium (1807) to Lewis’s 1916 electron‑pair model and Pauling’s 1932 electronegativity scale.
- Practical catalysts translate lab ideas to industry: Grubbs’ metathesis catalysts (1990s; Nobel 2005) cut steps and waste in drug and polymer syntheses.
