Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
T
B
HE
EGINNINGS
Pre-1600
Alchemists sought to turn base metals (iron, zinc, lead) into
gold using the four “elements”— earth, fire, air, and water.
About 1600
The idea of the four “elements” was challenged and the
chemical era began.
1600s
Robert Boyle worked out scientific experimental methods and
published his findings (the scientific method).
1700s
Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen.
Antoine Lavoisier distinguished between chemical and
physical changes and enumerated and verified the
fundamental law of the conservation of mass.
1800s
Dmitri Mendeleev published the Periodic Table of the
Elements.
Ancient man (prehistoric-600 BC) practiced certain chemical arts such as
extraction and working of metals, manufacture of leather, production of
alcoholic beverages, and the use of vegetable oils, alkaloids, and narcotics.
The Greek philosophers (600-200 BC) speculated on problems in the realm
of what we now call chemistry, but they did little or no experimentation. In
the Dark and Middle Ages, alchemy flourished and gradually evolved into
an experimental science as the result of the thinking of men such as Roger
Bacon (1214-1294), Paracelsus (1493-1541), and Francis Bacon
(1561-1626). The birth of modern chemistry as an exact science, based on
the law of the conservation of mass and on the quantitative study of chemical
reactions, is dated from the work of Lavoisier.
