Scheele, Carl Wilhelm, discovery

Scheele, Carl Wilhelm. The Discovery of Oxygen. Part II. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh. 1923. 

Chemists did not discover the mineral witherite (BaCO ) until the eighteenth century. Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742—1786) discovered barium oxide in 1774, but he did not isolate or identify the element barium. It was not until 1808 that Sir Humphry Davy used molten barium compounds (baryta) as an electrolyte to separate, by electrolysis, the barium cations, which were deposited at the negative cathode as metallic barium. Therefore, Davy received the credit for bariums discovery. 

The mngsten ore called scheehte is named after Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742—1786), who smdied and experimented with tungsten minerals, but as with many of his other near discoveries, such as oxygen, fluorine, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide, and manganese, he was not given credit. 

To address this question, we now jump from 3.5 Ga to —2.3 X 10 Ga. In the 1770s, three scientists—Carl Wilhelm Scheele (Sweden), Daniel Rutherford (Scotland), and Antoine Lavosier (France)—independently discovered the existence of nitrogen. They performed experiments in which an unreactive gas was produced. In 1790, Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal formally named the gas nitrogene. This discovery marked the beginning of our understanding of nitrogen and its role in Earth systems. 

The discovery of oxygen is usually credited to Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) and English chemist Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). The two discovered oxygen at nearly the same time in 1774, working independently of each other. 

Credit for the discovery of tungsten is often divided among three men—Spanish scientists Don Fausto D Elhuyard (1755—1833) and his brother Don Juan Jose D Elhuyard (1754-1796), and Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786). Tungsten s chemical symbol, W, is taken from an alternative name for the element, wolfram. 

Chlorine (CI2). The discovery of chlorine by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1774 marked the beginning of the modem era of bleaching. According to Sidney M. Edelstein in a 1948 journal article titled The Role of Chemistry in the Development of Dyeing and Bleaching, French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet was the first to use chlorine to bleach cotton and linen fabrics. 

Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) was another phenomenal chemist of the phlogistic era. He was actually the first discoverer of oxygen (1772-1774), on which he first published in 1777. He made other important discoveries including (i) chlorine and manganese, (ii) silicon fluoride and hydrofluoric acid from fluorspar, (iii) phosphorus from bone ash, phosphoric acid from the action of nitric acid on phosphorus, (iv) arsenic acid, molybydic acid, tungstic acid, arsenic... 

As so often happens in science, there is some debate about the primacy of the discovery of combinatorial chemistry. After all, it is almost certain that Carl Wilhelm Scheele was the first to discover oxygen (ca. 1771-72) but the discovery was made independently in 1774 by Joseph Priestley who published first. Similarly, Arpad Furka (1931- ), at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, first described the concept that would later be called combinatorial chemistry in a document notarized in May 1982. A Ph.D. thesis by his smdent on this topic was completed in 1987 and presented at conferences in Prague and Budapest in 1988 (a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war). His work first appeared in a refereed journal in 1991. In 1984, H. Mario Geysen (1944— ) at Glaxo Wellcome in North Carolina published research that employed combinatorial chemistry. In that year, Richard A. Houghton (1946- ) started the nonprofit Torrey Pines Institute for Molecular Studies and developed the tea bag method of combinatorial chemistry. 

Well, to answer that question, you would first want to know who first discovered oxygen, and there is no simple answer to that question There are three people to whom discovery of this can be ascribed Carl Wilhelm Scheel, Joseph Priestley, and Antoine Lavoisier. Scheele produced O2 (he called it fire aire ) from mercuric oxide (HgO) in 1772, but the result wasn t published until 1777. Meanwhile, in 1774 Priestley produced O2 (he called it dephlogisticated air ) using a similar experiment, which was published in 1775. Lavoisier claimed to have independently discovered the gas, and was in fact the first to explain how combustion worked via quantitative experiments, leading to the principle of Conservation of Mass, and ultimately disproving the entire idea of phlogiston. Whew. So Scheel found it first, but didn t report it Priestley reported it first, but didn t have the explanation correct and Lavoisier was last, but nailed it. Who would you give credit to ... 

Hydrogen sulfide, H2S, is a colourless, poisonous, corrosive, flammable and potentially explosive gas familiar to most people as rotten egg gas Its discovery is credited to Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1777. The gas is commercially available and applications range from organosulfur and metal-sulfur chemistry to the production of heavy water (Girdler-Spevack process). 

Carl Wilhelm Scheele discovered the tungsten mineral scheelite. He isolated and thoroughly described tungsten oxide, which he called tungsten acid. However, he did not have an adequate furnace in his pharmacy to reduce the oxide to metal. This was done by the two Spanish d Elhuyar brothers who are always named as the discoverers. The history of element discoveries is rather random. 

The discovery that air is complex and not simple removed one of the keystones in the ancient idea of matter, namely that air is one of the fundamental elements. It is generally accepted that Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley independently discovered oxygen in the period 1772-1774. Were they first Well, their priority is not questioned. Both expressed the view that air consists of two elements, oxygen and nitrogen. However, as happens for many important discoveries, they arrived at their conclusion when the time was right. Many other scientists had been on the same track but had taken longer to arrive at the right conclusion. 

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