Chapter 4: Still Looking For the Atom: Chemist and Electricians

This is an information dense chapter that goes through about 300 years of electrochemical history. It turns out that a lot happened between 1600 and 1900. These chemists did experiments when physicist at the time were stuck in a theoretical realm. The discoveries and intellectual leaps that these chemists made were incredibly important in advancing all fields of science. Now lets get to some of the major scientists:

Evangelista Torricelli (1608 – 1648) : he discovered air pressure, by inventing the first barometer. Through various experiments he also created the first vacuum, and proved the idea of “a void” to the scientific community.

Robert Boyle (1627- 1692): The author refers to him as “the father of chemistry”  He obviously came up with Boyles Law which says that the volume of the gas varied inversely with the pressure on it.

Antoine – Laurent Lavoisier (1743 – 1794): created the metric system which is used around the world in scientific inquiry. He was a fierce advocate of experiment procedure, he demanded accuracy. He was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution at the age of 50, apparently the people who were in charge did not like how outspoken he was.

John Dalton (1766 – 1844): A hermit like man, who was barely recognized by his peers until he revealed his atomic theory of matter. What set his work apart was that the weight of the particles played a crucial role. Although he was wrong in  saying that the chemical atom (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen etc.. ) was the smallest particle, he established the reality of atoms, and because each of his atoms had a different weight, he inspired others to explore why this is.

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 -1907): Siberian born odd ball, he lived off of a diet of sour milk, which was a medical fad of the time. He is responsible for the periodic table of elements. He put all of the known elements on playing cards, with their mass and other known info, and played with their order until he noticed certain periodical trends, when there wasn’t a known element to follow the patterns, he left a blank, and as time passed these blanks filled into what became the modern periodic table of the elements.

Between the years of 1820 – 18 70 there was a huge explosion of popularity surrounding electricity, and within that short time frame, many physicists including Coulomb,  Micheal Faraday, Hertz and James Clerk Maxwell conducted countless experiments that led to a unified theory and understanding of electricity, magnetism and light.

In 1898 J.J. Thomson unveiled years of work he conducted with cathode ray tubes that shattered the widely held belief that chemical atoms were the smallest unit of matter and were indivisible by “discovering” electrons. By proving that there were smaller particle, Thomson re-sparked the interest in particle physics.

This chapter is really interesting because it goes through the history of other fields of science and essentially gives the important points, while highlighting the relationships between various branches of science. It also went over the hardships that early chemists and the like had to face, a lack of knowledge, funds and equipment topping that list, it shows that these people had to be incredible intelligent and resourceful in order to make the types of intellectual leaps that they did. This brief history gives some background to what’s coming up in the book, which helps the reader to appreciate the gravity of the subject.