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
Famous quotes containing the words beginning and/or chemistry:
“You know, Frank, I’m beginning to get a new perspective on this crawling little animal known as man. Why a dog or a cat or a bird is cleverer than any human. They sense me immediately. But these shrewd detectives of yours—. Take away one of man’s senses and you render him helpless.”
—Lester Cole (1904–1985)
“...some sort of false logic has crept into our schools, for the people whom I have seen doing housework or cooking know nothing of botany or chemistry, and the people who know botany and chemistry do not cook or sweep. The conclusion seems to be, if one knows chemistry she must not cook or do housework.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)