My pick is the Mendeleev periodic Table of Chemical Elements, which is the basis of modern Chemisry as well as Nuclear Physics.
I can think of two right now and there are many others:
Disovering Oxygen in 1774 by Joseph Priestly
And,
Discovering and isolating radioactive materiald by Marie and Pierre Curie in the 1890s and early 1900s.
According to me, Petroleum is the most impressive discovery in Chemistry.
Dear prof. Babchin,
in my view the discoveries of organic and macromolecular chemistry are also remarkable. The ideas of reducing vital functions to chemical reactions, and to shift from colloidal chemistry (Zsigmondy) to the modeling of geometric structures (Staudinger).
Chemical calculations were largely enabled by the idea of stoichiometry (Richter) which predates Dalton's atomic theory by several decades.
Also, Berzelius' simple idea of writing chemical symbols using letters (instead of graphical symbols) made communicating chemical ideas significantly easier.
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