Benzoic Acid - History

History

Benzoic acid was discovered in the sixteenth century. The dry distillation of gum benzoin was first described by Nostradamus (1556), and subsequently by Alexius Pedemontanus (1560) and Blaise de Vigenère (1596).

Pioneer work in 1830 through a variety of experiences based on amygdalin, obtained from bitter almonds (the fruit of Prunus dulcis) oil by Pierre Robiquet and Antoine Boutron-Charlard, two French chemists, had produced benzaldehyde but they failed in working out a proper interpretation of the structure of amygdalin that would account for it, and thus missed the identification of the benzoyl radical C7H5O. This last step was achieved some few months later (1832) by Justus von Liebig and Friedrich Wöhler, who determined the composition of benzoic acid. These latter also investigated how hippuric acid is related to benzoic acid.

In 1875 Salkowski discovered the antifungal abilities of benzoic acid, which was used for a long time in the preservation of benzoate-containing cloudberry fruits.

Read more about this topic:  Benzoic Acid

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
    Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

    Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.
    Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)