Concept of the Atom, Atomic Structure of Matter and Origin of Chemistry 81
is an artificial one created by textbook writers. They ascribe those
results, which still stand today as due to the work of chemists and those
results, which have been discarded as due to alchemists. This is absurd if
we recall that Robert Boyle the so-called father of chemistry believed
that gold was a compound that could be manufactured from other metals
as he described in an essay entitled Of a Degradation of Gold made
by an anti-elixir: a strange chymical narrative, which was published in
London in 1678. The great Isaac Newton, the inaugurator of modern
mathematical physics, was also an alchemist. Because of certain
fraudulent practitioners of alchemy, alchemy got a bad reputation so that
the genuine scientific practitioners rebranded their science and called it
chemistry.
Although the alchemists believed that all chemical substances were
combinations of certain basic elements it was not until 1661 that Robert
Boyle established the modern definition of an element and a compound.
A compound is a substance that can be broken down into simpler
elements whereas an element is a substance that cannot be broken down
any further. Although Boyle defined the concept of an element and a
compound, subsequent research revealed that a number of substances he
identified as compounds were elements and vice versa. By 1800 as a
result of the work of such noted chemists as Lavoisier, Davy, Scheele,
Black, Priestly and Cavendish, over 30 elements had been correctly
identified, and a large number of chemical reactions had been studied
quantitatively and the qualitative distinction between a process of mixing
and a chemical reaction was discovered.
A mixture retains the qualities of the substance of which it is
composed. A chemical compound, on the other hand, is completely
different than its components. For example, the two gases (hydrogen and
oxygen) combine to form a liquid (water). The poisonous green gas
chlorine combines with the highly reactive metal sodium to form the
harmless substance, sodium chloride, we recognize as table salt.
It was found that mixtures could be prepared with any ratio of its
components. With a chemical compound, on the other hand, the ratio of
the weight of its constituents is always the same. So for example, it was
found that one gram of hydrogen combines with exactly eight grams of
oxygen to form 9 grams of water (H 2 O). It was also found that if two
elements, A and B, formed more than one compound, then the amounts
of the element A, which combined with a fixed amount of B are related
to each other as the ratio of whole numbers, which are generally quite