History of chemistry
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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By 1000 BC, ancient civilizations used technologies that would eventually form the basis of the various branches of chemistry. Examples include extracting metals from ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, making pigments for cosmetics and painting, extracting chemicals from plants for medicine and perfume, making cheese, dying cloth, tanning leather, rendering fat into soap, making glass, and making alloys like bronze.
Early attempts to explain the nature of matter and its transformations failed. The protoscience of chemistry, Alchemy, was also unsuccessful in explaining the nature of matter. However, by performing experiments and recording the results the alchemist set the stage for modern chemistry. This distinction begins to emerge when a clear differentiation was made between chemistry and alchemy by Robert Boyle in his work The Sceptical Chymist (1661). Chemistry then becomes a full-fledged science when Antoine Lavoisier develops his law of conservation of mass, which demands careful measurements and quantitative observations of chemical phenomena. So, while both alchemy and chemistry are concerned with the nature of matter and its transformations, it is only the chemists who apply the scientific method. The history of chemistry is intertwined with the history of thermodynamics, especially through the work of Willard Gibbs.
See also
Histories and timelines
- Atomic theory
- Cupellation
- History of chromatography
- 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
- History of molecular theory
- History of materials science
- Timeline of chemical elements discoveries
- Timeline of chemistry
- Timeline of materials technology
- Timeline of atomic and subatomic physics
- Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes
- List of years in science
- Nobel Prize in chemistry
- The Chemical History of a Candle
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
- Otto Hahn, 1879–1968
- Irving Langmuir, 1881–1957
- Walther Nernst, 1864–1941
- Linus Pauling, 1901–1994
- Glenn T. Seaborg, 1912–1999
- Frederick Sanger, 1918-
- Rudolph A. Marcus, 1923-
- Harold Kroto, 1939-
- Richard Smalley, 1943–2005
- Peter Atkins, 1940-
