Timeline of Chemistry - Pre-17th Century

Pre-17th Century

Prior to the acceptance of the scientific method and its application to the field of chemistry, it is somewhat controversial to consider many of the people listed below as "chemists" in the modern sense of the word. However, the ideas of certain great thinkers, either for their prescience, or for their wide and long-term acceptance, bear listing here.

c. 3000 BCE

Egyptians formulate the theory of the Ogdoad, or the “primordial forces”, from which all was formed. These were the elements of chaos, numbered in eight, that existed before the creation of the sun.

c. 1900 BCE

Hermes Trismegistus, semi-mythical ancient Egyptian adept king, is thought to have founded the art of alchemy.

c. 1200 BCE

Tapputi-Belatikallim, a perfume-maker and early chemist, was mentioned in a cuneiform tablet in Mesopotamia.

c. 450 BCE

Empedocles asserts that all things are composed of four primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water, whereby two active and opposing forces, love and hate, or affinity and antipathy, act upon these elements, combining and separating them into infinitely varied forms.

c. 440 BCE

Leucippus and Democritus propose the idea of the atom, an indivisible particle that all matter is made of. This idea is largely rejected by natural philosophers in favor of the Aristotlean view.

c. 360 BCE

Plato coins term ‘elements’ (stoicheia) and in his dialogue Timaeus, which includes a discussion of the composition of inorganic and organic bodies and is a rudimentary treatise on chemistry, assumes that the minute particle of each element had a special geometric shape: tetrahedron (fire), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water), and cube (earth).

c. 350 BCE

Aristotle, expanding on Empedocles, proposes idea of a substance as a combination of matter and form. Describes theory of the Five Elements, fire, water, earth, air, and aether. This theory is largely accepted throughout the western world for over 1000 years.

c. 50 BCE

Lucretius publishes De Rerum Natura, a poetic description of the ideas of atomism.

c. 300

Zosimos of Panopolis writes some of the oldest known books on alchemy, which he defines as the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.

c. 770

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan (aka Geber), an Arab/Persian alchemist who is "considered by many to be the father of chemistry", develops an early experimental method for chemistry, and isolates numerous acids, including hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, citric acid, acetic acid, tartaric acid, and aqua regia.

c. 1000

Abū al-Rayhān al-Bīrūnī and Avicenna, both Persian chemists, refute the practice of alchemy and the theory of the transmutation of metals.

c. 1167

Magister Salernus of the School of Salerno makes the first references to the distillation of wine.

c. 1220

Robert Grosseteste publishes several Aristotelian commentaries where he lays out an early framework for the scientific method.

c 1250

Tadeo Alderotti develops fractional distillation, which is much more effective than its predecessors.

c 1260

St Albertus Magnus discovers arsenic and silver nitrate. He also made one of the first references to sulfuric acid.

c. 1267

Roger Bacon publishes Opus Maius, which among other things, proposes an early form of the scientific method, and contains results of his experiments with gunpowder.

c. 1310

Pseudo-Geber, an anonymous Spanish alchemist who wrote under the name of Geber, publishes several books that establish the long-held theory that all metals were composed of various proportions of sulfur and mercury. He is one of the first to describe nitric acid, aqua regia, and aqua fortis.

c. 1530

Paracelsus develops the study of iatrochemistry, a subdiscipline of alchemy dedicated to extending life, thus being the roots of the modern pharmaceutical industry. It is also claimed that he is the first to use the word "chemistry".

1597

Andreas Libavius publishes Alchemia, a prototype chemistry textbook.