everything is transformed.” If he doesn’t hold the sole title as the Father of
Chemistry, he is the Father of Stoichiometry, the concept that chemical
compounds are composed of molecules in exact ratios, and that new
compounds can be formed via chemical reactions, either into larger novel
compounds or smaller constituent molecules.
Lavoisier, a nobleman who profited dramatically from the inequities of
the old French aristocracy, was the first person to organize a list of the
elements and to develop a language of scientific nomenclature to describe
the building blocks of the physical world. Like a trained chef who
understands the uses of baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and eggs,
Lavoisier was beginning to grasp how the elements interact with each
other and why metals rust, and how plants take in minerals from the soil
and chemicals from the air. His genius insight was to view the world as
amalgamated from its ingredients, its atoms, and he influenced his French
and European followers to conclude that the world could be described by
its building blocks. (Sadly, Lavoisier did not survive the French
Revolution, beheaded at age fifty. One of his pupils did escape to America
before suffering a similar fate: Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, patriarch of the
chemical dynasty.)
Before the periodic table could be formulated (by Russian chemist
Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869), a chance discovery before a “prepared mind”
helped transform grammar-school chemistry into a specialty on par with
mathematics and physics. William Henry Perkin entered the Royal
College of Chemistry in London as a fifteen-year-old in 1853, and
although Lavoisier is the pioneering giant of chemistry, young William
made a discovery in his flat in East London that set in motion modern
chemistry and revolutionized biology, medicine, and the pharmaceutical
and fashion industries.
Tasked by his professor at the college to synthesize quinine (the only
effective anti-malarial at the time), Perkin returned to his home on Cable
Street in London’s Shadwell area with reagents, flasks, and instruments in
hopes of creating the prized drug originally sourced from a South
American tree. On Easter break in 1856, by himself in a home laboratory,
the eighteen-year-old Perkin started with the basic ingredient, coal tar, a
black liquid byproduct of heating coal in the absence of air. Coal tars were
a common waste product in the new Industrial Revolution, and Perkin
began oxidation experiments with the mucky stuff in his upstairs flat.
marcin
(Marcin)
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