Birth of chemistry

1660-the royal society was founded in England

Robert Boyle

1661-Robert Boyle defined element, acid and base. He also discovered the gas law called Boyle.s law.

1666- The French academy of science was founded.

1735-Georg Brandt discovered Cobalt in his Swedish laboratory.

[Miners in the Harz mountains have often been frustrated by a substance which appears to be copper ore but which, when heated, yields none of the expected metal. Even worse, it emits noxious fumes.]

1751- Axel Cronstedt discovered Nickel in Sweden.

A similar demon is blamed by miners in Saxony for another ore which yields a brittle substance instead of copper. The impurity in ore of this type is analyzed in Sweden in 1751 by Axel Cronstedt. He identifies its components as arsenic and a previously unknown hard white metal, quite distinct from copper.

Joseph Black, the Scottish Chemist

1761-Black explored the properties of a gas produced in various reactions. He found that limestone could be heated or treated with acids to yield a gas he called "fixed air." He observed that the fixed air was denser than air and did not support either flame or animal life. Black also found that when bubbled through an aqueous solution of lime (calcium hydroxide), it would precipitate calcium carbonate. He used this phenomenon to illustrate that carbon dioxide is produced by animal respiration and microbial fermentation.

Henry Cavendish

1766-Henry Cavendish had set up a small laboratory in his house. He collected some iron, lead and tin pieces, besides hydrochloric acid. He then put an equal number of iron pieces in both acids. He did the same with the lead and tin piece producing hydrogen. As a result of the chemical process some bubbles surfaced. He collected the gas bubbles in separate balloons. He noticed that all the balloons contained samples of inflammable gases and they all produced similar blue flame. On further observation he found that the gases weighed the same and the volume of inflammable gas produced was proportionate to the metal pieces.

1774- Joseph Priestley and discovery of Oxygen.

On August 1, 1774, he conducted his most famous experiment. Using a 12-inch-wide glass "burning lens," he focused sunlight on a lump of reddish mercuric oxide in an inverted glass container placed in a pool of mercury. The gas emitted, he found, was "five or six times as good as common air." In succeeding tests, it caused a flame to burn intensely and kept a mouse alive about four times as long as a similar quantity of air.

In October 1774, Priestley visiting Paris with his noble patron, he describes his discovery to a gathering of French scientists. Among them is Lavoisier, who develops Priestley's experiments in his own laboratory and realizes that he has the evidence to disprove the phlogiston theory. He named it oxygen [meaning acid maker].

Antoine Lavoisier, the French Chemist.

In 1779 Lavoisier coined the name oxygen for the element released by mercury oxide. He found oxygen made up 20 percent of air and was vital for combustion and respiration. He also concluded that when phosphorus or sulfur are burned in air, the products are formed by the reaction of these elements with oxygen.

In 1777 Lavoisier correctly identified sulfur as an element. He had carried out extensive experiments involving this substance and observed that it could not be broken down into any simpler substances.

In 1778 Lavoisier found that when mercury oxide is heated its weight decreases. The oxygen gas it releases has exactly the same weight as the weight lost by the mercury oxide.

While this may seem obvious to us today, it was less so in those days (hence the general support for the phlogiston theory). After carrying out work with a number of different substances, and recalling earlier work such as his work in 1772 with carbon, Lavoisier announced a new fundamental law of nature:

The law of conservation of mass:

· matter is conserved in chemical reactions

or stated in another way:

· the total mass of a chemical reaction’s products is identical to the total mass of the starting materials

The law of mass conservation only became firmly established after Lavoisier independently discovered it.

In 1783 Lavoisier coined the name ‘hydrogen’ for the gas which Henry Cavendish had recognized as a new element in 1766; Cavendish had called the gas inflammable air.

Working again with Pierre-Simon Laplace, Lavoisier burned hydrogen with oxygen and found that water was produced, establishing that water is not an element, but is actually a compound made from the elements hydrogen and oxygen. This result astonished many people, because at that time ‘everyone knew’ that water was itself one of the ‘indivisible’ element

In1789 Lavoisier published his groundbreaking Elementary Treatise on Chemistry.

Elementary Treatise on Chemistry detailed his oxygen theory of chemistry (banishing phlostigon), made clear the difference between a compound and an element, and contained a list of chemical elements. The list included oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, carbon, antimony, cobalt, copper, gold, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, platinum, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.

Antoine Lavoisier is called the father of modern chemistry.