History of chemistry

Louis Pasteur was a great chemist. I met this personality, really interesting, on the occasion of a research I did at the time on the birth of Stereochemistry. Pasteur is known as a scientist in the fields of biology and medicine, but his beginnings were in the fields of crystallography and chemistry. In fact, he started with an academic preparation …

Jean Beguin’s first chemical equation. The slow process of differentiation, separation of chemical practice from that complex body of philosophical and scientific knowledge that goes by the name of alchemy, began in the 17th century. The field of application and development of chemistry was medicine. The main aim was the search for new drugs, especially of inorganic origin. Minerals were …

Presentation of Lavoisier’s Memoir : “EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMAL RESPIRATION” – year 1777 The main way to introduce the history and epistemology of chemistry into teaching is to use the memoirs, essays and pages of texts written by the protagonists of chemistry as a fundamental tool. I translated into english from French, I think for the first time, the memoir that …

Carl Scheele’s pigments The intense experimental activity of Carl Scheele (1742-1786) embraced the fields of organic and inorganic chemistry, obtaining incredible results in his short life (he died at the age of forty), having the back rooms of the pharmacies where he worked. There are Scheele’s discoveries that have had a great impact, such as the discovery of oxygen on …

The museum   I think there cannot be such a strong emotion for a chemist as that one feels when visiting Mendeleev’s apartment at the University of St. Petersburg. He lived there from 1867 to 1890. The apartment is located on the ground floor of the Faculty of Chemistry and was connected to his laboratory. Since 1911, four years after his …

William Prout (1785–1850):   a multifaceted  chemist and physician Prout’s personal and professional history makes us known as a scholar who has made important contributions in many fields of knowledge, from chemistry to physiology and medicine. In this article we will deal with two aspects of his research both derived from his early work on the relationship between density and atomic …

The “Sepulcher” of Antoine Lavoisier The article tells the random discovery made during a short stay in Paris, in search of the places of the history of chemistry. The visit to the catacombs of Paris, one of the many tourist destinations, made us known, through an exhibition set up there, where are the mortal remains of the father of chemistry.

The chemical laboratories of the first half of the 19th century Of the complex of Justus von Liebig’s chemical laboratories in Giessen, transformed since 1920 into one of the most interesting science museums in the world, one is struck by the size, the wealth of instruments and equipment. The museum preserves the Institute of Chemistry almost intact, where Liebig worked …

A long story The history of distillation is closely linked to that of alcohol. The mention of distilling devices can be found in the authors of ancient Greece. But these tools were very primitive because they consisted of boilers heated over a high heat on which a layer of sponges was placed which collected the vapors, condensed them and then …

The crystallography in chemistry When I taught basic chemistry, at the Industrial Technical Institute in Arezzo town (Italy), one of the first lessons of the course was dedicated to illustrating a laboratory experience that students would perform at home. It was the formation of sodium chloride crystals from a salt solution. After about a week each student brought to school …