The Beginning of Chemistry
- 1766 Henry Cavendish discovers and studies hydrogen
- 1778 Carl Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier discover that air is composed mostly of nitrogen and oxygen
- 1781 Joseph Priestley creates water by igniting hydrogen and oxygen
- 1800 William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle use electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen
- 1803 John Dalton introduces atomic ideas into chemistry and states that matter is composed of atoms of different weights
- 1805 Thomas Young conducts Double-slit experiment (approximate time)
- 1811 Amedeo Avogadro claims that equal volumes of gases should contain equal numbers of molecules
- 1832 Michael Faraday states his laws of electrolysis
- 1871 Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev systematically examines the periodic table and predicts the existence of gallium, scandium, and germanium
- 1873 Johannes van der Waals introduces the idea of weak attractive forces between molecules
- 1885 Johann Balmer finds a mathematical expression for observed hydrogen line wavelengths
- 1887 Heinrich Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect
- 1894 Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay discover argon by spectroscopically analyzing the gas left over after nitrogen and oxygen are removed from air
- 1895 William Ramsay discovers terrestrial helium by spectroscopically analyzing gas produced by decaying uranium
- 1896 Antoine Becquerel discovers the radioactivity of uranium
- 1896 Pieter Zeeman studies the splitting of sodium D lines when sodium is held in a flame between strong magnetic poles
- 1897 J.J. Thomson discovers the electron
- 1898 William Ramsay and Morris Travers discover neon, and negatively charged beta particles
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Atomic And Subatomic Physics
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