| ~250 B.C. |  Archimedes of Syracuse | The design of the Archimedean water screw and the study of spiral structure. |
| 1811 |  Dominque F.J. Arago |
| Discovery of the rotation of the polarization of light in quartz crystals. | |
| 1835 |  Jean-Baptiste Biot |
| Discovery of the rotation of the polarization of light in sugar solution. | |
| 1848 |  Louis Pasteur |
| Paratartaric acid is identified as the stereoisomer of tartaric acid. Pasteur postulates that nature has a chiral asymmetry. | |
| 1888 |  Friedrich Reinitzer |
| Discovery of the (chiral) blue phase of liquid crystals. Coining of the term "liquid crystals". | |
| 1893 |  Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) |
| Defines the notion of a chiral object and chirality. | |
| 1951 |  Linus Pauling and  Robert B. Corey |
| Discovery of the alpha-helix in protein. | |
| 1953 |  James D. Watson and  Francis Crick |
| Discovery of the DNA double-helix. | |
| 1956 |  Tsung Dao Lee and  Chen Ning Yang |
| Proposal of parity nonconservation to explain the "theta-tau" paradox. | |
| 1957 |  Chien-Shiung Wu |
| Discovery of parity violation in the beta-decay of 60Co. | |
| 1958 |  Richard P. Feynman and  Murray Gell-Mann, and |
 Robert E. Marshak and  E.C. George Sudarshan | |
| Parity violating "vector--axial vector" theory of the weak interaction. | |
| 1964 |  James Cronin and  Val L. Fitch |
| Discovery of CP violation in neutral kaon decays. | |
| 1973 |  Howard C. Berg and Robert A. Anderson |
| Prediction and confirmation of rotary motion in bacterial flagella. |