Abstract
Chemistry as we know it began with Black, Cavendish, Priestley, Scheele and Lavoisier. But its roots lie in alchemy, which combined genuine technique in preparing and handling chemical substances with illusion and fraud. The idea, that all substances are made of a few basic ‘elements’, is of course ancient. Earth, water, air and fire were supposed to be these basic elements, or ‘roots’ of everything else.
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- 1.
This is how the ancients recovered pure silver from the metal obtained by smelting silver–lead ores and which looks like lead. Not knowing the mechanism by which this happened, the ancients believed that lead was turned into silver by the efficacy of fire. And because they never weighed the initial total mass and the final product, they were easily misled.
- 2.
The Swedish chemist Carl Scheele discovered oxygen, working independently, at about the same time as Priestley did. It appears that Scheele was first but failed to publish his discovery. Lavoisier produced oxygen later than Priestley, but it was he who gave the gas the name oxygen and the one who described his properties in more detail.
- 3.
One hundred years after Cavendish’s experiment it was found that this gas (approximately 0.93 % of air) is the rare gas argon. There is also a small amount of carbon dioxide (0.04 % of air) in the atmosphere.
- 4.
It is worth noting that it was another scientist, Daniel Rutherford, a former student of Joseph Black, who was given credit for the discovery of nitrogen (phlogisticated air). Because Cavendish did not publish his discovery, Rutherford who lived in Glasgow, did not know of it when he made his own discovery in 1772. And again, it was Lavoisier who described the properties of nitrogen in more detail.
- 5.
The modern city of Manchester honours him by naming one of its colleges after him: The John Dalton College of Technology. For more on Dalton, Cavendish and and the other pneumatic chemists of that era, see: R. Uhlig, Genius of Britain, Collins, London, 2010.
- 6.
Charles became a professor of physics at the Paris Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, and the first man to make an ascent in a hydrogen balloon.
- 7.
The Celsius scale of temperature (originally known as the centigrade scale) increases uniformly from 0 °C (the temperature of ice in equilibrium with water at standard pressure) to 100 °C (the temperature of water in equilibrium with steam at standard pressure). It is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–1744) who devised the inverted form of this scale (ice point at 100°, steam point at zero degrees) in 1742.
- 8.
A volume of nitrogen weighs less than the same volume of oxygen under the same conditions of temperature and pressure.
- 9.
Try anything else and the law of partial pressures will not hold. For example, if we put P=N 2 kT/V, we obtain, for a mixture of two gases, (N 1 + N 2)²kT/V ≠ N 21 kT/V + N 22 kT/V, in contradiction to the law of partial pressures.
- 10.
Because Eq.(8.6) is accurately valid in this case, it can be used to define the absolute temperature as follows: Given PV for a gas at the temperature, T B , at which water boils (at standard pressure) and at the temperature, T F , at which it freezes (at standard pressure), we mark these two points on a diagram of PV versus T and draw a straight line through them as shown below.
The absolute scale of temperature is obtained by dividing the interval between T F and T B into 100 equal steps (degrees Kelvin). The interception of this line with the T-axis defines the absolute zero temperature (T = 0). This way of defining the absolute temperature scale is equivalent to that of Lord Kevlin.
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Modinos, A. (2014). The Beginnings of Chemistry. In: From Aristotle to Schrödinger. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00750-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00750-2_8
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