in 1817.The presence of magnesium in chlorophyll was discovered in 1906, and was the first detection of that element in living tissue.

After initial work done by German chemist Richard Willstätter spanning from 1905 to 1915, the general structure of chlorophyll a was elucidated by Hans Fischer in 1940. By 1960, when most of the stereochemistry of chlorophyll a was known, Robert Burns Woodward