Father of chemistry

It is both difficult to determine an exact date for the beginning of modem chemistry and impracticable to bestow the designation of father of chemistry on any one individual. Some historians date the end of alchemy and the beginning of modem chemistry to the early seventeenth century. Over the years many men and women of different races and from many countries have contributed to our current knowledge and understanding of chemistry. A few examples follow. 

LAVOISIER, ANTOINF.. LAURENT 11743-1794). A French chemist generally regarded as the "father" of chemistry. His "Traile elemcniaire de chimie" (17891 listed 30 elements, clarified the nomenclature of acids. 

But there were many who disbelieved. "This is one of those strange guesses which by the law of averages must come true, they argued. Silly to believe that new elements could be predicted with such accuracy One might as well predict the birth of a new star in the heavens. Had not Lavoisier, the father of chemistry, declared that "all that can be said upon the nature... 

More than two centuries before, Robert Boyle, revered by Englishmen as the father of chemistry, had declared the elements to be the practical limits of chemical analysis. He believed them to be substances incapable of decomposition by any means with which we are at present acquainted. But, he added, there may be some agent so subtle and so powerful as to be able to resolve the compounded corpuscles into those more simple ones, whereof they consist. Robert Boyle, of course, never dreamed of the new chemistry and the new physics But Thomson did. He had an abiding faith in the simplicity of nature. There must be something simpler than... 

In the Middle Ages, Muslim scientists Jabir bin Hayyan - the first to use lab equipment - was known as Geber, or the Father of Chemistry in Europe and Abu Bakr-AI-Razi (865-925) both greatly contributed in chemistry s early beginnings. 

Lavoisier, A. L. (1743-1794). Discovered nitrogen, studied acids, and described the composition of many organic compounds. Generally regarded as the father of chemistry. 

The foundations of the modem science and the systematic investigation of the elements began in the Arabic world where experiments with scientific questions were well underway in the ninth-century ad. Jabir ibn Hayyan, one of the founding fathers of chemistry, was bom in Persia and a prolific scholar. He emphasized experimentation and invented a wide variety of laboratory equipment, as weU as a number of fundamental processes such as distillation and crystallization. He discovered and described many basic chemical substances - including hydrochloric and nitric acid, and the elements arsenic, antimony and bismuth - that are the basis of chemistry today. He was the first to purify and isolate sulfur and mercury as pure elements. He began to systematically describe the basic elements and provided the framework for the periodic table by distinguishing metals and nomnetals in his classification. 

In 1661 Boyle published the first edition of The Sceptical Chymist. A second, expanded edition was published in 1680. It has earned him the title the father of chemistry among some British historians. Many point to this as the work in which Boyle examined numerous alchemical procedures and ultimately rejected the classically derived notion of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) also dismissed the Paracelsian notion of three essences salt, sulfur, and mercury and articulated a relatively modern working definition of atoms. Modern scholarship has questioned some of the details of this interpretation of Boyle s work, but his importance cannot be denied. 

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was born in Ireland to a wealthy family, educated at Eton, received further education on the Continent, and returned to England in 1645. He began his scientific studies during the following decade and in 1656 moved to Oxford, where he secured the assistance of Robert Hooke. Hooke built a vacuum pump (Figure 145) for Boyle, who used it for numerous studies, including study of the relationship between volume and pressure of gas that now bears his name (see p. 210). Boyle is generally considered to be the Father of Chemistry due in part to his gas law and other physical studies but also because of his... 

Antoine Lavoisier was a careful scientist who made detailed observations and planned his experiments. These characteristics allowed him to relate the process of respiration to the process of combustion. He coined the term oxygen for the gas that had been isolated by Priestly. His studies led him to the Law of Conservation of Matter, which states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. This law was instrumental in helping Dalton develop his atomic theory. Lavoisier is sometimes called the father of chemistry. 

If Lavoisier is the father of chemistry, then Linus Pauling is the father of the chemical bond. His investigations into the exact nature of how bonding occurs between elements were critical in the development of our modern understanding of bonding. His book. The Nature of the Chemical Bond, is a classic in the field of chemistry. 

By emphasizing the importance of quantitative analysis, Lavoisier helped establish chemistry as a science. His work on combustion laid to rest the phlogiston theory and the theory that air is an element. He also explained why hydrogen burned in oxygen to form water, or hydrogen oxide. He later published one of the first chemistry textbooks, which established a common naming system of compounds and elements and helped unify chemistry worldwide. These accomplishments earned Lavoisier the reputation of being the father of chemistry. 

Law of Conservation of Mass There is no detectable change in mass in an ordinary chemical reaction. (This law was first stated in 1798 by the father of chemistry, the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier. Since, as shown in Item 5 of Figure 3.1, no atoms are lost, gained, or changed in chemical reactions, mass is conserved.)... 

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