Pure chemistry Sweden

The S3nnposiuin on Surface Phenomena in Enhanced Oil Recovery was held at Stockholm, Sweden, during August 20-25, 1979. The Symposium was organized within the framework of Third International Conference on Surface and Colloid Science. Plenary and main lectures presented at the Conference have been published in the May 1980 issue of the official lUPAC journal Pure and Applied Chemistry, copies of which can be obtained from Pergamon Press, Oxford, UK. Republication of the lectures of J. J. Taber and H. F. Eicke in this volume has been carried out with the permission of lUPAC. 

Artur J. M. Valente, PhD, is currently Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Department of University of Coimbra. In 2004 and 2006 he was a guest and invited researcher, respectively, in the Division of Physical Chemistry 1, Lund University, Sweden. He has more than 90 publications in ISI international journals, over 100 communications at scientific meetings, 10 papers in national journals, one patent, and two books. He is also co-editor of two books, a special issue of the Journal of Molecular Liquids (2010), and a forthcoming issue of Pure Applied Chemistry. 

Discovery C. Hatchett in England discovered the oxide of niobium in an American mineral in 1801. He called the element columbium and the mineral columbite. H. Rose in Germany rediscovered the element in 1844 and called it niobium. lUPAC, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, decided in 1950 that the name should be niobium (Nb) and not columbium (Cb). C. W. Blomstrand, professor at the University of Lund in southern Sweden was probably the first to see the metal. In 1864 he heated niobium chloride in an atmosphere of hydrogen and got steel-gray niobium with a metallic luster. 

Lacy, W. J., and Keeler, H. G., Process Modification to Abate Pollution in the Food Industry, presented at the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry Conference held in Stockholm, Sweden, Nov. 1974. 

Bose, A., P. T. Funke, K. G. Das, and R. J. Suhadolnik Incorporation of phenyl-alanine-i N and glycine- N into gliotoxin. XXIInd Meeting, Internal. Congr. of Pure and Applied Chemistry, Stockholm, Sweden, 1966. 

However, this methodological attitude also gave rise to the only instance of critical response to Mendeleev that I have found. This response came from one of the most advanced analytical chemists in Sweden—a pure laboratory chemist, who experienced all systems as too hypothetical. When the associate professor of chemistry at Uppsala University, Lars Fredrik Nilson (1840-99), determined the atomic weight of beryllium, his results did not fit the supposed place of the element in the system. He doubted not his own results but rather the system, which he would not take for granted, and certainly not only as a mere doctrine. At the very least he wanted the system to be better experimentally verified, a claim scientists in Sweden routinely demanded from any theory. Soon thereafter, chemists in Sweden could give such an experimental support. 

Such a use of spectral analysis in chemistry did not in itself decisively contribute to the acceptance of the periodic system among chemists in Sweden. But it was instrumental in the sense that it could verify, or at least disprove, the existence of most of the new elements reported by chemists, and that it could demonstrate the pureness of a certain sample, which in turn was important when its atomic weights and other characteristics were to be determined. In Sweden spectral analysis and chemical analysis existed in a fruitful symbiosis at the end of the nineteenth century. 

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