* 1760 Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt isolates the organoarenic compound cacodyl
* 1827 William Christopher Zeise produces Zeise's salt; the first platinum / olefin complex
* 1848 Edward Frankland discovers diethylzinc
* 1890 Ludwig Mond discovers nickel carbonyl
* 1899 John Ulric Nef discovers alkynylation using sodium acetylides.
* 1909 Paul Ehrlich introduces Salvarsan for the treatment of syphilis, an early arsenic based organometallic compound
* 1912 Nobel Prize Victor Grignard and Paul Sabatier
* 1930 Henry Gilman invents lithium cuprates, see Gilman reagent
* 1940 Eugene G. Rochow and Richard Müller discover the direct process for preparing organosilicon compounds
* 1930s and 1940s Otto Roelen and Walter Reppe develop metal-catalyzed hydroformylation and acetylene chemistry
* 1951 Walter Hieber was awarded the Alfred Stock prize for his work with metal carbonyl chemistry.
* 1951 Ferrocene is discovered
* 1956 Dorothy Crawfoot Hodgkin determines the structure of vitamin B, the first biomolecule found to contain a metal-carbon bond, see bioorganometallic chemistry
* 1963 Nobel prize for Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta on Ziegler–Natta catalyst
* 1973 Nobel prize Geoffrey Wilkinson and Ernst Otto Fischer on sandwich compounds
* 1981 Nobel prize Roald Hoffmann and Kenichi Fukui for creation of the Woodward-Hoffman Rules
* 2001 Nobel prize W. S. Knowles, R. Noyori and Karl Barry Sharpless for asymmetric hydrogenation
* 2005 Nobel prize Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs, and Richard Schrock on metal-catalyzed alkene metathesis
* 2010 Nobel prize Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi, Akira Suzuki for palladium catalyzed cross coupling reactions