What was the first vitamin to be discovered and named?

In 1905, an Englishmen named William Fletcher became the first scientist to determine whether the removal of special factors, known as vitamins, from food would lead to diseases.

In 1906, English biochemist Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins also found that certain food factors were important to health. In 1912, Polish scientist Cashmir Funk named the special nutritional parts of food a "vitamine" after "vita," which meant life and "amine" from compounds found in the thiamine he isolated from rice husks. Vitamine was later shortened to vitamin. Together, Hopkins and Funk formulated the vitamin hypothesis of deficiency disease, which postulates that a lack of vitamins could make you sick.

Elmer V. McCollum and Marguerite Davis discovered Vitamin A around 1912 to 1914. In 1913, Yale researchers Thomas Osborne and Lafayette Mendel discovered that butter contained a fat-soluble nutrient soon known as vitamin A. Vitamin A was first synthesized in 1947.