Barium Sulfate - History

History

Barium sulfate is reduced to barium sulfide by carbon. The accidental discovery of this conversion many centuries ago led to the discovery of the first synthetic phosphor (Hollman and Wiberg, 2001). The sulfide, unlike the sulfate, is water soluble. Sometime prior to the autumn of 1803, the Englishman John Dalton was able to explain the results of some of his studies by assuming that matter is composed of atoms and that all samples of any given compound consist of the same combination of these atoms. Dalton also noted that in series of compounds, the ratios of the masses of the second element that combine with a given weight of the first element can be reduced to small whole numbers (the law of multiple proportions). This was further evidence for atoms. Dalton's theory of atoms was published by Thomas Thomson in the 3rd edition of his System of Chemistry in 1807 and in a paper about strontium oxalates published in the Philosophical Transactions. Dalton published these ideas himself in the following year in the New System of Chemical Philosophy. The symbol used by Dalton for barium is shown below.

During the early part of the 20th century, during the Japanese colonization period, hokutolite was found to exist naturally in the Beitou hot-springs area near Taipei City, Taiwan. Hokutolite is a radioactive mineral composed mostly of PbSO₄ and BaSO₄, but also containing traces of U, Th and Ra.2 The Japanese harvested these elements for industrial uses, and also developed dozens of “therapeutic hot-spring baths” in the area.