Distillations magazine

The feud between William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy over the newly discovered element thallium rested on the very definition of discovery.

How did a seemingly benign chemical and a near-miraculous public-health initiative spark decades and decades debate?

During the 1860s and 1870s, was a booming New York City’s stench choking the health from its citizens? Chemist Charles Frederick Chandler aimed to find out.

A 1904 caricature from Vanity Fair is a striking example of the role images played in creating the Marie Curie myth.

The impact of the Civil War can still be seen politically, socially, and economically, but its influence on medicine is often obscured.

When the EPA needed a way to identify and measure pollutants, Robert Finnigan, an ex–Cold War engineer, offered his computerized mass spectrometer for the job.

A 19th-century chemist was the first to raise the alarm about adulterated food.

Observing as experts investigate whether La Bella Principessa is in fact the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

The ubiquity of arsenic in 19th-century Britain.

Faced with the prospect of a world without oil, French engineer Eugene Jules Houdry turned low-grade coal into gasoline.

Two years after getting his PhD, future Nobel Prize winner Marshall Nirenberg set out to probe the genetic code despite having no experience in the fields at the forefront of this work.

Thin became “in” during the 1920s, and the calorie became a vital tool in the battle to lose weight. Yet before becoming a fashion necessity, the calorie had a decidedly less glamorous role.

In the so-called Hamel Catastrophe of 1820, a scientific expedition lost three local guides after the entire party fell 1,200 feet in an avalanche.

In the 19th century, chemical oblivion replaced liquor, opiates, and bleeding as the numbing agent of choice for surgeons.

Susan Solomon led expeditions in Antarctica and proposed the now-accepted theory about the role of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in creating the ozone hole.

Gutta percha, a natural plastic found in tree sap, allowed the expansion of the 19th century’s global communications network.

In the 19th century a young Italian outside the chemistry mainstream played a part in the creation of the first periodic table.

Mining magazines, newspapers, comic books, and movies to catch a glimpse of science as imagined by earlier generations.