Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
is credited to a German merchant and alchemist Hennig Brand (ca.
1630-ca. 1710) in 1669, although other alchemists might have
discovered phosphorus around the same time. Brand experimented
with urine, which contains considerable quantities of dissolved
phosphates from normal metabolism. However, it was Antoine
Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), who recognized phosphorus as a
chemical element in 1777. Interestingly, but phosphorus appears to
be the first element discovered since antiquity. To conclude these
introductive exercises, the earliest research paper, I have been able
to find, containing the word “phosphorus” in the title was written
by Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and published in 1693 after his death
[6].
8.2
Knowledge on Calcium Orthophosphates in
the 18
th
Century
Due to the big problems with accessing to the scientific literature
published in the first half of the 19
th
century and even earlier, a
deep invasion into the history of the subject still remains to be both
fragmental and incomplete. That time, the scientific concepts were
rather different from the modern ones and chemical formulae of
the substances had not been introduced yet. Furthermore, scientific
journals were rare; luckily, many scientific topics published before
the 20
th
century have been scanned by Google as a part of its project
to make the world's topics discoverable online. This timely project by
Google combined with the power of the modern electronic databases
of scientific publications allows reconstructing the major historical
milestones on calcium orthophosphates, which was often impossible
for earlier writers. For example, a paper of 1994 by Driskell entitled:
“Early history of calcium phosphate materials and coatings” [7]
starts from the classical publication of 1920 by Albee assisted by
Morrison [8]. In 1999, Shackelford published a paper: “Bioceramics
— an historical perspective” [9], in which the same publication by
Albee and Morrison [8] was mentioned as the earliest reference. The
same is valid for the historical papers by Hulbert,
. [10, 11] and
Shepperd [12]. Thus, it seemed that calcium phosphates had been
unknown before 1920. Certainly, this is not the case; nevertheless,
the precise sequence of the scientific events happened in the 18
et al
th
century still remain poorly restorable, while the historical time scale
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