The term geochemistry was first used by the Swiss-German chemist Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1838: "a comparative geochemistry ought to be launched, before geognosy can become geology, and before the mystery of the genesis of our planets and their inorganic matter may be revealed." However, for the rest of the century the more common term was "chemical geology", and there was little contact between geologists and chemists.
Geochemistry emerged as a separate discipline after major laboratories were established, starting with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in 1884, which began systematic surveys of the chemistry of rocks and minerals. The chief USGS chemist, Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, noted that the elements generally decrease in abundance as their atomic weights increase, and summarized the work on elemental abundance in The Data of Geochemistry.
The composition of meteorites was investigated and compared to terrestrial rocks as early as 1850. In 1901, Oliver C. Farrington hypothesised that, although there were differences, the relative abundances should still be the same.  This was the beginnings of the field of cosmochemistry and has contributed much of what we know about the formation of the Earth and the Solar System.
In the early 20th century, Max von Laue and William L. Bragg showed that X-ray scattering could be used to determine the structures of crystals. In the 1920s and 1930s, Victor Goldschmidt and associates at the University of Oslo applied these methods to many common minerals and formulated a set of rules for how elements are grouped. Goldschmidt published this work in the series  Geochemische Verteilungsgesetze der Elemente [Geochemical Laws of the Distribution of Elements].
The research of Manfred Schidlowski from the 1960s to around the year 2002 was concerned with the biochemistry of the Early Earth with a focus on isotope-biogeochemistry and the evidence of the earliest life processes in Precambrian.