FAMOUS DISCOVERIES IN THE FIELD OF

CHEMISTRY

Periodic Table of the Elements: The periodic table of the elements is one
of the most important developments in the history of the field of chemistry.
The periodic table consists of all of the chemical elements that are known
and they are arranged and organized on the table according to their electron
configurations, atomic numbers, and their recurring chemical properties. The
order in which the elements are presented on the table correspond to their
atomic number.

The person who first published the periodic table of the elements was Dmitri
Mendeleev, a Russian chemist. He developed the table based on his findings
and the findings of other chemists, including John Newlands and Antoine-
Laurent de Lavoisier. Newlands published a work entitled the Law of Octaves
in 1865. This work discussed the periodicity of the known elements of the
time according to their atomic weight. In his work, he also made a proposal
that helped identify the potential for elements, including germanium.
However, the Society of Chemists did not recognize or endorse his idea until
more than two decades later.
Mendeleev published a two-volume work entitled Principles of Chemistry
between 1868 and 1870, after he became a teacher. This work because the
ultimate textbook regarding chemistry and the elements. In the book, he
strived use a chemical’s properties in order to classify them in a simple table.
Oxygen: While oxygen has always existed since before mankind was even
on the earth, discovering the nature of oxygen and its elements was a huge
accomplishment in the history of chemistry. Joseph Priestley is the scientist
who is credited with discovering oxygen in 1774, but Antoine Lavoisier gets
the credit for discovering the element that oxygen is made from.
However, there is some controversy over who was actually the first person to
discover this all-important element. In 1772, a Swedish chemist by the name
of Carl Wilhelm Scheele made the same discovery that Priestley made.
Unfortunately, he didn’t officially publish his findings until 1777, which was
five years after his discovery.
Priestley conducted several experiments to help understand the nature of
oxygen better. He experimented with its role in respiration and in
combustion. He also used oxygen in an experiment in which he dissolved
fixed air in water. This created carbonated water, but he called it
“dephlogisticated air.”
While Priestley experimented with oxygen and found out much about it, it
was Lavoisier who actually gave the element its name. He also accurately
described how it plays a role in combustion. In addition, he worked with
others to help come up with oxygen’s chemical nomenclature.

Electrons: Electrons are negatively charged particles, but that was unknown
for many years. Scientists knew about electricity and worked with it for many
years before they understood that its current was actually composed of
electrons. Many scientists worked with cathode tubes which created streams
of electricity, but they were not sure how it actually worked.
Some thought that the cathode rays were actually streams of particles.
Others thought the rays traveled through a mysterious “ether.” It wasn’t until
1897 when JJ Thomson decided to find out what exactly was going on with
electric currents. Thomson, who taught physics at the UK’s Cambridge
University, placed cathode tubes in magnetic and electric fields. He knew
that the fields moved particles from one side to another, but they did not
have an effect on how the waves actually move.
During his experiments, he found that the cathode rays bend over to one
side. As a result, he determined that cathode rays must be made of small
particles, which he termed “corpuscles.” At first, he thought these small
particles were too small for anybody to care about. However, he found out
that electric currents were composed of moving electrons. And since most of
the products that people use these days are operated by electricity, the
electron became one of the most important discoveries in chemistry and
physics.

Atomic Theory: In 1808, John Dalton discovered a way to link invisible

atoms together to things that had measurable qualities, such as a mineral’s
mass or the volume of a certain gas. In his theory, he stated that elements
consist of small microscopic particles that are called atoms. His theory went
on to state that a pure element only consists of identical atoms that have the
same mass.
Dalton wasn’t the first person to believe that all life was made up of tiny
particles called atoms, though. This idea originated to the 5 th century in
Greece when Leucippus of Miletus, a Greek philosopher of the time, and his
student Democritus believed that atoms were too small to be seen. Their
theory went on to say that atoms were solid and did not have any internal
structure. They also believed that taste, color and other qualities were made
up of atoms.
Aristotle did not agree with the theory that everything was made up of small
particles. And since he was such an influential person of his time and even
beyond his time, the philosophy of an atomic theory was largely dismissed
for several centuries.
Dalton gave credibility to the idea of the atomic theory when he published A
New System of Chemical Philosophy. His theory was based on four ides. The
first is that atoms composed chemical elements. The second is that the
atoms in an element had the exact same weight. Third, the atoms in different
elements had varying weights. And finally, atoms only combined in small
ratios of whole numbers in order to form compounds. The Greeks had many
of these ideas and Dalton built on them. His main contribution to the theory
was a way to determine an elements atomic weight. In 1805, he published
an essay which included the atomic weights for more than 20 elements. In
addition, Dalton is also credited with being the first person to provide
standard symbols for recognizing the elements.

Radioactivity: In the 1890s and early 1900s, Marie and Pierre Curie worked
with uranium ore, extracting the uranium from it and experimenting with it
and studying it. As a result, they discovered and were able to isolate
radioactive materials. Marie found that the residual materials from the
uranium were actually more active than pure uranium.
The Curies were building on earlier findings that were discovered by Antoine
Henri Becquerel in 1896. He was a French scientist who was doing
experiments on exposing uranium-bearing crystal to the sunlight. After
sitting the uranium in the sun and then placing it on a photographic plate,
there was an image on the plate. He put the uranium in a drawer for a few
days because the weather was cloudy and sunlight experiments were not
possible. When he came back to the uranium a few days later, he found that
it had left an image even though there was no light. This was radioactivity,
but it was the Curies who coined the term following their experiments with
spontaneous emissions.
In 1903, the Curies and Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize in physics for their
work in discovering radioactivity. Marie Curie won another Nobel Prize in
1911 for discovering radium and polonium, becoming the only person to win
two Nobel Prizes.

Penicillin: The discovery of penicillin is credited to Alexander Fleming, a

Scottish scientist and Nobel Prize winner in 1928. Fleming found that growing
Penicillium rubens created a property that could be used as an antibiotic. He
named this discovery penicillin.
Felming’s discovery almost did not happen though. In fact, it was almost
thrown away in the trash. He was studying a Petri dish that had already been
discarded when he found that the mold in the dish actually contained a
powerful antibiotic. At the time of the discovery, Fleming was working at St.
Mary’s Hospital. He had just returned from a family vacation when he was
going through the Petri dishes that he left aside for another scientist to use
while he was gone.
Fleming was sorting through the Petri dishes and putting the contaminated
ones in a tray that was filled with Lysol. When his former lab assistant, Merlin
Pryce, came by to talk to Fleming, Fleming began talking about all of the
added work that he was doing lately. He began going through his stack of
Petri dishes, some that were not submerged in the Lysol. When he picked up
one of the dishes to show Pryce, he noticed that there was a mold in the dish
that had killed the staphylococcus bacteria that was growing in there. It was
at this point that he realized he may be on to something.
Fleming spent the next few weeks doing experiments and trying to single out
the substance in the mold that had killed the bacteria. He discussed his
finding with a mold expert – C.J. La Touche – who worked in the same
building. That is when they reached the conclusion that the mold had to be a
penicillium mold. They also speculated that the mold had possibly floated up
to Fleming’s lab from La Touche’s lab, which was located directly beneath
Fleming’s. During his further experiments, Fleming found that the new mold
he had discovered was non-toxic. He published his findings in 1929, but
there was not a great acceptance of what he found.
While he did discover this antibiotic, it wasn’t until nearly a decade later
when someone was able to turn this discovery into the drug that it was
become today.
With Fleming’s discovery of penicillin erupted a strong interest in the field
and study of antibiotics in the modern era. And although Fleming gets the
credit for discovering this antibiotic property, it wasn’t until more than a
decade later when Howard Walter Florey, an Australian Nobel Prize winner,
along with Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley developed penicillin as a
medicine while working at Oxford University during World War II. They
isolated the substance that had bacteria-killing properties and turned it into
a brown powder. Once they found that it was safe to use, they mass
produced it so it could be available to the soldiers during the war. It saved
hundreds if not thousands of lives of soldiers who would have died of an
infection otherwise. It was used and is still used to treat problems like
pneumonia, syphilis, gangrene and much more.

Partiv Aravind XI - E