| |
| 1771 |
Joseph Priestley, England, discovers that plants can “purify” air that has been “burned out” by a candle. |
| 1779 |
Jan Ingenhousz, The Netherlands, demonstrates that the plant in Priestley’s experiment is dependent on light and its green parts. |
| 1782-1804 |
Several researchers show that carbon dioxide and water are stored as organic matter by plants. |
| 1845 |
Robert Mayer, Germany, points out that plants store solar energy in organic matter. |
| ca 1915 |
Richard Willstätter, Germany, (Nobel Prize 1915) suggests that chlorophyll plays an active role in plants. |
| ca 1930 |
Cornelis van Niel, USA, proposes that photosynthesis is based on oxidation-reduction reactions and that the primary reaction is a photolysis of water followed by oxygen evolution. |
| 1932 |
Robert Emerson and William Arnold, USA, conclude that several hundred chlorophyll molecules cooperate in photosynthesis. |
| 1939 |
Robert Hill, England, demonstrates that photolysis of water and carbon dioxide fixation are separate processes. |
| 1940 |
Hans Fischer, Germany, solves the chemical structure of chlorophyll. (Nobel Prize 1930 for his investigations of hemes and chlorophyll.) |
| 1954 |
Melvin Calvin, USA, (Nobel Prize 1961) and coworkers unravel the reactions of carbon dioxide fixation. |
| 1954 |
Daniel Arnon, USA, discovers light-dependent synthesis of ATP (photophosphorylation). |
| 1960-1961 |
Robert Hill and Fay Bendall, England, and independently Louis Duysens, The Netherlands, show how two separate photosystems cooperate in plants. |
| 1968 |
William Parson, USA, confirms Duysens’ hypothesis (1956) that chlorophyll is oxidized in the primary reaction of photosynthesis. |
| 1984 |
Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel, The Federal Republic of Germany, solve the structure of a photosynthetic reaction center from a bacterium. |
