ATP was discovered in 1929 by Karl Lohmann and Jendrassik and, independently, by Cyrus Fiske and Yellapragada Subba Rao of Harvard Medical School, both teams competing against each other to find an assay for phosphorus.
It was proposed to be the intermediary between energy-yielding and energy-requiring reactions in cells by Fritz Albert Lipmann in 1941.
It was first synthesized in the laboratory by Alexander Todd in 1948, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1957 partly for this work.
The 1978 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Peter Dennis Mitchell for the discovery of the chemiosmotic mechanism of ATP synthesis.
The 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was divided, one half jointly to Paul D. Boyer and John E. Walker "for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)" and the other half to Jens C. Skou "for the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, Na, K -ATPase."