Early chemical knowledge

In the first century of our era, two works important for their records of early chemical knowledge were written. These are the treatise in five books on Materia Medica by Dioscorides Pedanus, a Greek physician, a work considered... 

In the two decades between Lavoisier s Traite and Daltons New System of Chemical Philosophy, we find a conscious effort to accommodate chemical knowledge to a systematic compositional framework. This assimilation was organized through the new nomenclature and the operational concept of simple body. At the same time, there was a great increase in the gathering of quantitative data and attempts to find rational patterns to incorporate them. The results anticipated empirically the laws of constant composition and multiple proportion that reached full rationality in Dalton s atomic theory early in the next century. 

Of course, most of the chemical reactions employed in the production of fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals are rather complex from a mechanistic point of view. However, it should be possible to propose reasonable empirical models for most of the reactions from basic chemical knowledge. An empirical reaction model has to fulfil the needs of the early process development, but does not have to represent deep insight into the actual reaction mechanism. Thus, an empirical reaction model need only describe the most important main and side reactions with as few reaction parameters as possible. This will minimise the effort needed to quantify the proposed parameters and increase the robustness of the model in the later application. 

A. Nieto-Galan, Calico-printing and chemical knowledge in Lancashire in the early nineteenth century the life and colours of John Mercer , Ann. Sci., 54, 1997, 1-28. 

Between those early, primitive wine makers and todays high-tech fermentation experts is a lot of chemical knowledge. This knowledge has given us more than just better-tasting wines. Our improved understanding of how matter combines spawned the modern chemical industry, which produces the materials that go into almost everything we use in our daily lives—from toothpastes and soaps to skyscrapers and jet planes. 

Early scientific knowledge recognized two basic types of substances according to their effect on living organisms beneficial (e.g., foods and medicines) and harmful (those that cause sickness or death). Modem science acknowledges that such a sharp division is not justified. Many chemical substances or mixtures exert a whole spectrum of ac-... 

In 1831, it was discovered that the vapors given off when a gummy material from the balsam tree (called s tor ax) was heated contained the chemical substance styrene. Storax has also been found in substances from embalmed Egyptian mummies some 3000 years old. As early as 1831, scientists knew that liquid styrene was one of those unusual substances that could undergo a certain chemical change to become a hard solid. As scientists gained chemical knowledge about the natural styrene, they eventually learned how to produce synthetic styrene. 

During the past several years, you have gained chemical vocabulary and understanding from a variety of academic and entertainment venues. List three events that occurred early in the development of your current chemical knowledge. 

---