Theodore William Richards was an American physical chemist and the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements." The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1914, announced November 11, 1915. Theodore W. Richards, “in recognition of his accurate determinations of the atomic weight of a large number of chemical elements”. Theodore W. Richards: born 1868, Germantown, PA, USA. Wiki link Data: the Nobel Foundation (CC0).