Introduction to Chemistry
Introduction to Chemistry
Chemistry is the branch of science which deals with the composition of matter and also the Physical and Chemical characteristics associated with the different material objects.
A French chemist, Lavoisier (1743-1793) is regarded as father of modern chemistry.
He established the law of conservation of mass, determined that combustion and respiration are caused by chemical reactions with what he named “oxygen,” and helped systematize chemical nomenclature, among many other accomplishments.
The father’ s of Chemistry (early) is Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) for the Introduced the experimental method in alchemy (d. 815)
Father of Chemistry: Different Branches
Those known as the father of a scientific field in chemistry are considered to be the founder of that scientific field. In some fields several people are considered the founders, while in others the title of being the "father" is debatable.
| Subject | Father | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Chemistry (early) | Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) | Introduced the experimental method in alchemy (d. 815) |
| Chemistry (modern) | Antoine Lavoisier Robert Boyle Jöns Berzelius John Dalton (founders) |
Book: Elements of Chemistry (1787) Book: The Sceptical Chymist (1661) Development of chemical nomenclature (1800s) Revival of atomic theory (1803) |
| Atomic theory (early) | Democritus | Founder of atomism in cosmology |
| Atomic theory (modern) | Father Roger Boscovich | First coherent description of atomic theory, well over a century before modern atomic theory emerged First scientific description of the atom as a building block for more complex structures |
| Chemical thermodynamics (modern) | Gilbert Lewis, Willard Gibbs, Merle Randall, Edward Guggenheim (founders) |
Books: Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances (1923) and Modern Thermodynamics by the Methods of Willard Gibbs (1933); because of the major contributions of these two books in unifying the applications of thermodynamics to chemistry |
| Nuclear chemistry | Otto Hahn | Book: Applied Radiochemistry (1936) First person to split an atomic nucleus (1938) Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovery of nuclear fission (1944) |
| Periodic table | Dmitri Mendeleev | Arranged sixty-six elements (known at the time) in order of atomic weight by periodic intervals (1869) |
| Physical chemistry | Svante Arrhenius Wilhelm Ostwald Hermann von Helmholtz Willard Gibbs (founders) | Devised much of the theoretical foundation for physical chemistry through their publications off, On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances(1876), and Thermodynamik chemischer Vorgange(1882) |