The 19th Century

In 1814, J.J. Berzelius succeeded for the first time in systematically naming chemical substances by building on the results of quantitative analyses and on the definition of the term "element by Lavoisier. In the 19th century, the number of known chemical compounds increased so rapidly that it became essential to classify them, to avoid a complete chaos of trivial names (see Section 2.2.4). 

Since the discovery of 1,3-butadiene in the 19th century, it has grown into an extremely versatile and important industrial chemical (30). Its conjugated double bonds allow a large number of unique reactions at both the 1,2- and 1,4-positions. Many of these reactions produce large volumes of important industrial materials. 

In recent years new ec]uipment has been invented, chemical processes, piping materials, valve designs, and new teehnologies not eonsidered when these formulas were developed with eold water in the 19th century. There is a need to measure the aetual losses onee an industrial plant is eommissioned and operations begin. I he authors of this book have developed a formula that permits the measurements of these losses in a live functioning system. Here it is ... 

The active and passive electrochemical processes on which present-day corrosion protection is based were already known in the 19th century, but reliable protection for pipelines only developed at the turn of the 20th century. 

Early in the 19th century, there were giants of natural philosophy, such as Dalton, Davy and most especially Faraday, who would have defied attempts to categorise them as physicists or chemists, but by the late century, the sheer mass of accumulated information was such that chemists felt they could not afford to dabble in physies, or viee versa, for fear of being thought dilettantes. 

Until the beginning of the 19th century, it was thought that heat was an invisible substance called caloric. An object at a high temperature was thought to contain more caloric than one at a low temperature. However, British physicist Benjamin Thompson in 1798 and British chemist Sir Humphry Davy in 1799 presented... 

It is usual to think that plastics are a relatively recent development but in fact, as part of the larger family called polymers, they are a basic ingredient of animal and plant life. Polymers are different from metals in the sense that their structure consists of very long chain-like molecules. Natural materials such as silk, shellac, bitumen, rubber and cellulose have this type of structure. However, it was not until the 19th century that attempts were made to develop a synthetic... 

The first experiment with the electrostatic gas cleaning was made in 1824, when Hohlfeld show that a fog was cleared from a glass jar which contained an electrically charged point electrode. Similar demonstrations were published in the 19th century, an example being the precipitation of tobacco smoke in a glass cylinder by Guitard (1850). 

This incident occurred in the 19th century when boiler explosions were much more frequent than they are today. But are you sure something similar could not occur today Read Sections 10.7.2 (b) and (c) before you decide. 

Three-membered rings with one hetero atom were known in the 19th century. Today they are of great interest, both scientifically and technically. Because of ring strain, they are energy-rich compounds comparable with cyclopropane. 

As the science of organic chemistry slowly grew in the 19th century, so too did the number of known compounds and the need for a systematic method of naming them. The system of nomenclature we ll use in this book is that devised by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC, usually spoken as eye-you-pac). 

It has been known for centuries that codistillation of many plant materials with steam produces a fragrant mixture of liquids called essential oils. For hundreds of years, such plant extracts have been used as medicines, spices, and perfumes. The investigation of essential oils also played a major role in the emergence of organic chemistry as a science during the 19th century. 

Knowledge of the amino acids developed slowly during the 19th century, since Mulder (200) and other pioneer workers devoted most of their efforts to the solution of other problems, particularly the elementary composition of proteins. As recently as 1890, Osborne (211) determined the elementary composition of oat-kernel proteins in the first of his now-classical investigations on vegetable proteins. 

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