History of chemistry

The discovery of fire and atomism

The roots of chemistry can be traced to the phenomenon of burning.^{[citation needed]} Fire was a mystical force that was said to transform one substance into another, and was thus an object of wonder and superstition. Fire affected many aspects of early societies, such as their diet, because it allowed them to cook food, and make pottery, specialised tools and utensils.

Atomism can be traced back to ancient Greece and ancient India.^{[citation needed]} Greek atomism dates back to 440 BCE, as what might be indicated by the book De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things)^[1] written by the Roman Lucretius^[2] in 50 BCE. In the book was found ideas traced back to Democritus and Leucippus, who declared that atoms were the most indivisible part of matter. This coincided with a similar declaration by Indian philosopher Kanada in his Vaisheshika sutras around the same time period.^[3] Kashyapa may have arrived at his sutras by meditation. By similar means, he coined a form of gases. What Kanada declared by sutra, Democritus declared by philosophical musing. Both suffered from a lack of empirical data. Without scientific proof, the existence of atoms was easy to deny. Aristotle opposed the existence of atoms in 330 BC; and the atomism of the Vaisheshika school was also opposed for a long time.^{[citation needed]}

In Europe, the Church raised Aristotle's writings almost to the level of scripture, associating atomism as some form of heresy. Aristotle's writings were preserved in Arabic in the Muslim world, and were later translated to Latin by St. Thomas Aquinas and alchemist Roger Bacon in the 13th century.

The rise of metallurgy

Main article: History of ferrous metallurgy

It was fire that led to the discovery of glass and the purification of alloys heralded the Bronze Age. After the Bronze Age, the history of metallurgy was marked by which army had better weaponry. Countries in Eurasia had their heydays when they made the superior alloys, which, in turn, made better armour and better weapons. This often determined the outcomes of battles.^{[citation needed]}

Indian metallurgy and alchemy

Main article: History of metallurgy in the Indian subcontinent

Significant progress in metallurgy and alchemy was made in ancient India. Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization I: Our Oriental Heritage:

"Something has been said about the chemical excellence of "Damascus" blades, for example, was taken by the Arabs from the Persians, and by the Persians from India."

The philosopher's stone and the rise of alchemy

Main article: Alchemy

Many people were interested in finding a method that could convert cheaper metals into gold. The material that would help them do this was rumored to exist in what was called the alchemy. Alchemy was practiced by many cultures throughout history and often contained a mixture of philosophy, mysticism, and protoscience.^{[citation needed]}

Alchemy not only sought to turn base metals into gold, but especially in a Europe rocked by bubonic plague, there was hope that alchemy would lead to the development of medicines to improve people's health. The holy grail of this strain of alchemy was in the attempts made at finding the Isaac Newton, who remained one throughout his life.

Problems encountered with alchemy

There were several problems with alchemy, as seen from today's standpoint. There was no systematic naming system for new compounds, and the language was esoteric and vague to the point that the terminologies meant different things to different people. In fact, according to The Fontana History of Chemistry (Brock, 1992):

The language of alchemy soon developed an arcane and secretive technical vocabulary designed to conceal information from the uninitiated. To a large degree, this language is incomprehensible to us today, though it is apparent that readers of Geoffery Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale or audiences of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist were able to construe it sufficiently to laugh at it.^[4]

Chaucer's tale exposed the more fraudulent side of alchemy, especially the manufacture of counterfeit gold from cheap substances. Soon after Chaucer, Dante Alighieri also demonstrated an awareness of this fraudulence, causing him to consign all alchemists to the Inferno in his writings. Soon after, in 1317, the Avignon Pope John XXII ordered all alchemists to leave France for making counterfeit money. A law was passed in England in 1403 which made the "multiplication of metals" punishable by death. Despite these and other apparently extreme measures, alchemy did not die. Royalty and privileged classes still sought to discover the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life for themselves.^[5]

There was also no agreed-upon scientific method for making experiments reproducible. Indeed many alchemists included in their methods irrelevant information such as the timing of the tides or the phases of the moon. The esoteric nature and codified vocabulary of alchemy appeared to be more useful in concealing the fact that they could not be sure of very much at all. As early as the 14th century, cracks seemed to grow in the facade of alchemy; and people became sceptical.^{[citation needed]} Clearly, there needed to be a scientific method where experiments can be repeated by other people, and results needed to be reported in a clear language that laid out both what is known and unknown.

Beginnings of chemistry

Early chemists

See also: Alchemy (Islam)

The development of the modern scientific method was slow and arduous, but an early scientific method for chemistry began emerging among early Muslim chemists. One of the most influential among them was the 9th century chemist Geber, who some consider to be the "father of chemistry".^{[6] [7] [8]} Other influential Muslim chemists included Al-Razi, Abu-Rayhan Biruni and Al-Kindi. Alexander von Humboldt regarded the Muslim chemists as the founders of chemistry. ^[9]

Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization IV: The Age of Faith:

"Chemistry as a science was almost created by the Moslems; for in this field, where the Greeks (so far as we know) were confined to industrial experience and vague hypothesis, the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished drugs. Alchemy, which the Moslems inherited from Egypt, contributed to chemistry by a thousand incidental discoveries, and by its method, which was the most scientific of all medieval operations."^[10]

For the more honest practitioners in Europe, alchemy was an intellectual pursuit, and over time, they got better at it. dimethyl ether, which had neither mercury nor sulfur.^{[citation needed]}

  The first alchemist considered to have applied the modern scientific method to alchemy and to separate chemistry further from alchemy was Robert Boyle (1627–1691).^{[citation needed]} Robert Boyle was an atomist, but favoured the word corpuscle over atoms. He comments that the finest division of matter where the properties are retained is at the level of corpuscles.

Boyle was credited with the discovery of Boyle's Law. He is also credited for his landmark publication The Sceptical Chymist, where he attempts to develop an atomic theory of matter, with no small degree of success.

Despite all these advances, the person celebrated as the "father of modern chemistry" is Antoine Lavoisier who developed his law of Conservation of mass in 1789, also called Lavoisier's Law.^{[citation needed]} With this, Chemistry was allowed to have a strict quantitative nature, allowing reliable predictions to be made.

Antoine Lavoisier

Although the archives of chemical research draw upon work from ancient Babylonia, Egypt, and especially the Arabs and Persians after Islam, modern chemistry flourished from the time of heat as a form of motion, and stated the idea of conservation of matter.

The vitalism debate and organic chemistry

After the nature of combustion (see aspirin. The discovery also contributed greatly to the theory of isomerism.^{[citation needed]}

Disputes about atomism after Lavoisier

Throughout the 19th century, chemistry was divided between those who followed the atomic theory of Brownian motion in the first decade of the 20th century.^[11]

Well before the dispute had been settled, many had already applied the concept of atomism to chemistry. A major example was the electrolysis or electrodeposition of metals was shown to be associated with certain quantities of chemical elements, and fixed quantities of the elements therefore with each other, in specific ratios.^{[citation needed]} These findings, like those of Dalton's combining ratios, were early clues to the atomic nature of matter.

The periodic table

Main article: History of the periodic table

For many decades, the list of known chemical elements had been ekasilicon, ekaaluminium, and ekaboron respectively. Mendeleev made his prediction in 1870; gallium was discovered in 1875, and was found to have roughly the same properties that Mendeleev predicted for it.^{[citation needed]}

The modern definition of chemistry

Classically, before the 20th century, chemistry was defined as the science of the nature of matter and its transformations. It was therefore clearly distinct from physics which was not concerned with such dramatic transformation of matter. Moreover, in contrast to physics, chemistry was not using much of mathematics. Even some were particularly reluctant to using mathematics within chemistry. For example, Auguste Comte wrote in 1830:

Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry.... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry -- an aberration which is happily almost impossible -- it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science.

However, in the second part of the 19th century, the situation changed and August Kekule wrote in 1867:

I rather expect that we shall someday find a mathematico-mechanical explanation for what we now call atoms which will render an account of their properties.

After the discovery by UV radiations on Earth. Chemistry was therefore re-defined as the science of matter that deals with the composition, structure, and properties of substances and with the transformations that they undergo.^{[citation needed]} However the meaning of matter used here relates explicitly to substances made of atoms and molecules, disregarding the matter within the atomic nuclei and its nuclear reaction or matter within highly ionized plasmas. Nevertheless the field of chemistry is still, on our human scale, very broad and the claim that chemistry is everywhere is accurate.

Quantum chemistry

Main article: Quantum chemistry

Some view the birth of quantum chemistry in the discovery of the Schrödinger equation and its application to Erich Hückel, Douglas Hartree, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock, to cite a few.^{[citation needed]}

Still, skepticism remained as to the general power of quantum mechanics applied to complex chemical systems.^{[citation needed]} The situation around 1930 is described by Paul Dirac:^[13]

"The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation. Hence the quantum mechanical methods developed in the 1930s and 1940s are often referred to as theoretical spectroscopy than answers to chemically relevant questions."

In the 1940s many physicists turned from nitrogen. Those computations were performed with the help of tables of integrals which were computed on the most advanced computers of the time.^{[citation needed]}

Molecular biology and biochemistry

Main articles: History of biochemistry

By the mid 20th century, in principle, the integration of physics and chemistry was extensive, with chemical properties explained as the result of the Linus Pauling's book on The Nature of the Chemical Bond used the principles of quantum mechanics to deduce bond angles in ever-more complicated molecules. However, though some principles deduced from quantum mechanics were able to predict qualitatively some chemical features for biologically relevant molecules, they were, till the end of the 20th century, more a collection of rules, observations, and recipes than rigorous ab initio quantitative methods.^{[citation needed]}

This heuristic approach triumphed in 1953 when biochemistry of life.

In the same year, the Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated that basic constituents of amino acids, could themselves be built up from simpler molecules in a simulation of primordial processes on Earth. Though many questions remain about the true nature of the origin of life, this was the first attempt by chemists to study hypothetical processes in the laboratory under controlled conditions.^{[citation needed]}

In 1983 Kary Mullis devised a method for the in-vitro amplification of DNA, known as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which revolutionized the chemical processes used in the laboratory to manipulate it. PCR could be used to synthesize specific pieces of DNA and made possible the sequencing of DNA of organisms, which culminated in the huge human genome project.^{[citation needed]}

Chemical industry

Main article: Chemical industry

The later part of the nineteenth century saw a huge increase in the exploitation of petroleum extracted from the earth for the production of a host of chemicals and largely replaced the use of chemical engineering for their cost-effective production.^{[citation needed]}

In the mid-twentieth century, control of the electronic structure of germanium. Accurate control of their chemical composition by doping with other elements made the production of the solid state transistor in 1951 and made possible the production of tiny integrated circuits for use in electronic devices, especially computers, which revolutionized the world.^{[citation needed]}

See also

Histories and timelines

• History of electrochemistry
• History of the molecule
• History of molecular biology
• History of the periodic table
• History of physics
• History of science and technology
• History of thermodynamics
• History of energy
• Discoveries of the chemical elements
• Timeline of chemistry
• Timeline of materials technology
• Timeline of microphysics
• Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes
• List of years in science
• Nobel Prize in chemistry

Chemists

listed chronologically:

• List of chemists
• Joseph Black, 1728-1799
• Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804
• Carl Wilhelm Scheele, 1742-1786
• Alessandro Volta, 1745-1827
• Jacques Charles, 1746-1823
• Claude Louis Berthollet, 1748-1822
• Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, 1778-1850
• Humphry Davy, 1778-1829
• Jöns Jakob Berzelius, inventor of modern chemical notation, 1779-1848
• Justus von Liebig, 1803-1873
• Louis Pasteur, 1822-1895
• Stanislao Cannizzaro, 1826-1910
• Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, 1829-1896
• Willard Gibbs, 1839-1903
• J. H. van 't Hoff, 1852-1911
• Marie Curie, 1867-1934
• Victor Grignard, 1871-1935
• Gilbert N. Lewis, 1875-1946
• Glenn T. Seaborg, 1912-1999

Notes

References

• Selected classic papers from the history of chemistry
• Biographies of chemists
• Eric R. Scerri, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance, Oxford University Press, 2006.