The Evolution of Chemistry

Historical Development of Chemistry:

• Chemistry has a history that spans from ancient civilizations to the present day.

• Ancient humans had basic knowledge of chemistry, including the discovery of fire and the extraction of metals from ores.

• Alchemy, the predecessor of modern chemistry, was unsuccessful in explaining the nature of matter and its transformations.

• The history of chemistry is intertwined with the history of thermodynamics, especially through the work of Willard Gibbs.

• The Bronze Age marked a major technological shift with the discovery of alloys like bronze.

• Iron working was invented by the Hittites in about 1200 BC, beginning the Iron Age.

• Philosophical attempts to rationalize the properties of different substances led to the postulation of primary classical elements.

• The early theory of atomism can be traced back to ancient Greece and India.

• Alchemy and chemistry were not separate disciplines until the 18th century.

• The Islamic world played a significant role in the development of chemistry, with Muslim scholars translating works of ancient Greek philosophers into Arabic.

• Problems with alchemy included a lack of systematic naming for new compounds and no agreed-upon scientific method for making experiments reproducible.

• The 17th and 18th centuries saw practical attempts to improve the refining of ores and their extraction, leading to the beginnings of modern chemistry.Key Figures and Discoveries in the History of Chemistry

• Georg Agricola's work in the 16th century described the processes of mining metal ores, metal extraction, and metallurgy, and is considered the "father of metallurgy."

• Sir Francis Bacon's The Proficience and Advancement of Learning in 1605 describes what would later be known as the scientific method.

• Jan Baptist van Helmont coined the term "gas" and conducted notable experiments involving gases, as well as being considered the founder of pneumatic chemistry.

• Robert Boyle played a key part in elevating chemistry as an independent, fundamental, and philosophical discipline, and is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas.

• Georg Stahl coined the name "phlogiston" for the substance believed to be released in the process of burning, and Axel Fredrik Cronstedt identified cobalt and nickel as separate metallic elements.

• Joseph Black isolated carbon dioxide, and Joseph Priestley independently isolated oxygen in its gaseous state, calling it "dephlogisticated air."

• Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered oxygen and tungsten, and José and Fausto Elhuyar succeeded in isolating tungsten by reduction of tungstic acid with charcoal.

• Alessandro Volta constructed the first electrical battery to produce electricity and is considered the founder of electrochemistry.

• Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier established the Law of Conservation of Mass, discovered oxygen and hydrogen, and developed a new system of chemical nomenclature.

• Éleuthère Irénée du Pont founded the DuPont chemical company and learned manufacturing of gunpowder and explosives under Antoine Lavoisier.Key Developments in Chemistry: Dalton's atomic theory, Berzelius's table of atomic weights, Gay-Lussac's law of combining volumes, and Avogadro's hypothesis

• E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, a major gunpowder manufacturer in Delaware, was founded by du Pont who was vigilant about the quality of the materials he used.

• Chemistry was divided between those who followed the atomic theory of John Dalton and those who did not, with the dispute being settled by Jean Perrin's experimental investigation of Einstein's atomic explanation of Brownian motion in the early 20th century.

• Dalton proposed a modern atomic theory in 1803 which stated that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles termed atoms, atoms of a given element possess unique characteristics and weight, and three types of atoms exist.

• Joseph Proust proposed the law of definite proportions, which states that elements always combine in small, whole number ratios to form compounds, based on several experiments conducted between 1797 and 1804.

• Jöns Jacob Berzelius compiled a table of relative atomic weights in 1828, which provided evidence in favor of Dalton's atomic theory and identified the exact elementary constituents of a large number of compounds.

• Berzelius developed the radical theory of chemical combination, discovered that atomic weights are not integer multiples of the weight of hydrogen, and originated the chemical terms "catalysis", "polymer", "isomer", and "allotrope".

• Humphry Davy electrolyzed molten salts and discovered several new metals, especially sodium and potassium, and experimented with gases by inhaling them, leading to the discovery of the unusual effects of nitrous oxide.

• Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac concluded that equal volumes of all gases expand equally with the same increase in temperature and that gases at constant temperature and pressure combine in simple numerical proportions by volume, and the resulting product or products—if gases—also bear a simple proportion by volume to the volumes of the reactants.

• The element iodine was discovered by Bernard Courtois in 1811, and Humphry Davy invented the Davy lamp in 1815, which allowed miners within coal mines to work safely in the presence of flammable gases.

• Amedeo Avogadro hypothesized in 1811 that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules, from which it followed that relative molecular weights of any two gases are the same as the ratio of the densities of the two gases under the same conditions of temperature and pressure.

• Avogadro's hypothesis was neglected for half a century due to theoretical problems, such as Berzelius's "dualism", and the fact that many chemists were skeptical that a molecule composed of two electrically similar atoms could exist.Advances in Chemistry in the 1800s

• Avogadro's hypothesis began to gain broad appeal among chemists in the mid-1800s.

• Friedrich Wöhler's synthesis of urea in 1828 revolutionized the vitalism debate, leading to the synthesis of hundreds of organic compounds.

• Vladimir Markovnikov's rule, developed in the mid-1800s, explained reactivity based on the structural arrangement of atoms.

• Germain Hess proposed Hess's law in 1840, an early statement of the law of conservation of energy.

• In 1847, Hermann Kolbe obtained acetic acid from completely inorganic sources, further disproving vitalism.

• William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin established the concept of absolute zero in 1848.

• Louis Pasteur discovered the nature of optical rotation in 1849, advancing the field of stereochemistry.

• In 1852, August Beer proposed Beer's law, which established the analytical technique known as spectrophotometry.

• In 1855, Benjamin Silliman, Jr. pioneered methods of petroleum cracking, making the entire modern petrochemical industry possible.

• Dmitri Mendeleev's development of the first modern periodic table in the late 1800s allowed for a systematic classification of all the known chemical elements.

• Mendeleev's law allowed him to predict the properties of three yet-to-be-discovered elements, which were later discovered and confirmed his predictions.

• Alfred Nobel's invention of dynamite in 1867 and gelignite in 1876 revolutionized the explosives industry.