Timeline of Chemistry - 17th and 18th Centuries

17th and 18th Centuries

1605

Sir Francis Bacon publishes The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, which contains a description of what would later be known as the scientific method.

1605

Michal Sedziwój publishes the alchemical treatise A New Light of Alchemy which proposed the existence of the "food of life" within air, much later recognized as oxygen.

1615

Jean Beguin publishes the Tyrocinium Chymicum, an early chemistry textbook, and in it draws the first-ever chemical equation.

1637

René Descartes publishes Discours de la méthode, which contains an outline of the scientific method.

1648

Posthumous publication of the book Ortus medicinae by Jan Baptist van Helmont, which is cited by some as a major transitional work between alchemy and chemistry, and as an important influence on Robert Boyle. The book contains the results of numerous experiments and establishes an early version of the law of conservation of mass.

1661

Robert Boyle publishes The Sceptical Chymist, a treatise on the distinction between chemistry and alchemy. It contains some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reaction, and marks the beginning of the history of modern chemistry.

1662

Robert Boyle proposes Boyle's law, an experimentally based description of the behavior of gases, specifically the relationship between pressure and volume.

1735

Swedish chemist Georg Brandt analyzes a dark blue pigment found in copper ore. Brandt demonstrated that the pigment contained a new element, later named cobalt.

1754

Joseph Black isolates carbon dioxide, which he called "fixed air".

1757

Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt, while investigating arsenic compounds, creates Cadet's fuming liquid, later discovered to be cacodyl oxide, considered to be the first synthetic organometallic compound.

1758

Joseph Black formulates the concept of latent heat to explain the thermochemistry of phase changes.

1766

Henry Cavendish discovers hydrogen as a colorless, odourless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air.

1773–1774

Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley independently isolate oxygen, called by Priestley "dephlogisticated air" and Scheele "fire air".

1778

Antoine Lavoisier, considered "The father of modern chemistry", recognizes and names oxygen, and recognizes its importance and role in combustion.

1787

Antoine Lavoisier publishes Méthode de nomenclature chimique, the first modern system of chemical nomenclature.

1787

Jacques Charles proposes Charles's law, a corollary of Boyle's law, describes relationship between temperature and volume of a gas.

1789

Antoine Lavoisier publishes Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, the first modern chemistry textbook. It is a complete survey of (at that time) modern chemistry, including the first concise definition of the law of conservation of mass, and thus also represents the founding of the discipline of stoichiometry or quantitative chemical analysis.

1797

Joseph Proust proposes the law of definite proportions, which states that elements always combine in small, whole number ratios to form compounds.

1800

Alessandro Volta devises the first chemical battery, thereby founding the discipline of electrochemistry.