History of Chemistry - From Fire To Atomism

From Fire To Atomism

Arguably the first chemical reaction used in a controlled manner was fire. However, for millennia fire was simply a mystical force that could transform one substance into another (burning wood, or boiling water) while producing heat and light. Fire affected many aspects of early societies. These ranged from the most simple facets of everyday life, such as cooking and habitat lighting, to more advanced technologies, such as pottery, bricks, and melting of metals to make tools.

Philosophical attempts to rationalize why different substances have different properties (color, density, smell), exist in different states (gaseous, liquid, and solid), and react in a different manner when exposed to environments, for example to water or fire or temperature changes, led ancient philosophers to postulate the first theories on nature and chemistry. The history of such philosophical theories that relate to chemistry, can probably be traced back to every single ancient civilization. The common aspect in all these theories was the attempt to identify a small number of primary elements that make up all the various substances in nature. Substances like air, water, and soil/earth, energy forms, such as fire and light, and more abstract concepts such as ideas, aether, and heaven, were common in ancient civilizations even in absence of any cross-fertilization; for example in Greek, Indian, Mayan, and ancient Chinese philosophies all considered air, water, earth and fire as primary elements.

Atomism can be traced back to ancient Greece and ancient India. Greek atomism dates back to 440 BC, as what might be indicated by the book De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) written by the Roman Lucretius in 50 BC. In the book was found ideas traced back to Democritus and Leucippus, who declared that atoms were the most indivisible part of matter. This coincided with a similar declaration by Indian philosopher Kanada in his Vaisheshika sutras around the same time period. In much the same fashion he discussed the existence of gases. What Kanada declared by sutra, Democritus declared by philosophical musing. Both suffered from a lack of empirical data. Without scientific proof, the existence of atoms was easy to deny. Aristotle opposed the existence of atoms in 330 BC.

Much of the early development of purification methods is described by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia. He made attempts to explain those methods, as well as making acute observations of the state of many minerals.