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The Chinese believed that metal, wood, water, earth and fire made up matter, something that changed thanks to great philosophers and intellectuals.
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The discovery of fire, led them to make their food more airship and without pathogens, in addition to the realization of weapons with metals.
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Techniques were found for the transmutation of metal, the elixir of life was sought and new substances were discovered like nitric acid.
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It was focused on medicine and finding cures for discomforts.
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It was believed that if a material was flammable, it had a lot of phlogiston.
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Robert Boyle publishes The Sceptical Chymist, a treatise on the distinction between chemistry and alchemy. It has some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reactions. -
Robert Boyle proposes Boyle's law, which was based on the description of the behavior of gases, specifically about the relationship between pressure and volume. -
Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen as a colorless, odourless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air. -
Antoine Lavoisier recognizes and names oxygen, and recognizes its role in combustion. -
Jacques Charles proposes Charles's law that describes the relationship between temperature and volume of a gas. -
Alessandro Volta devised the first chemical battery, thereby founding the discipline of electrochemistry. -
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac discovers that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by volume. -
Amedeo Avogadro proposes Avogadro's law, that equal volumes of gases under constant temperature and pressure contain equal number of molecules. -
William Prout classifies biomolecules into their modern groupings: carbohydrates, proteins and lipids. -
Friedrich Woehler accidentally synthesized urea from inorganic materials.
Discovered by Alexander Fleming. In September 1928, he noticed the growth of a fungus during experiments, but made his discovery public until 1929. -
Lord Kelvin establishes the concept of absolute zero, the temperature at which all molecular motion ceases. -
August Beer proposes Beer's law, which explains the relationship between the composition of a mixture and the amount of light it will absorb. -
Heinrich Geissler creates the first vacuum tube. -
Friedrich Kekulé looks at the chemical structure of benzene, bringing the study of molecular structure to chemistry. -
Alexandre-Émile Béguyer de Chancourtois publishes the telluric helix, an early, three-dimensional version of the periodic table of the elements. -
Lothar Meyer develops an early version of the periodic table, with 28 elements organized by valence. -
Johann Josef Loschmidt determines the exact number of molecules in a mole, later named Avogadro's number. -
Dmitry Mendeleev formulated the periodic table to make easier to identify the known elements, without memorize the characteristics of each one. There were several scientists involved and they noted that certain chemicals were helpful in performing painless surgeries. -
William Crookes created a glass vacuum tube which had a zinc sulfide coating on the inside of one, a metal cathode put in the other end and a metal anode in the shape of a cross. When electricity was run through the tube, an image of the cross appeared and the zinc sulfide glowed. That made him to do the hypothesis that there must have been rays coming from the cathode which caused the zinc sulfide to fluoresce and the cross to create a shadow.
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Svante Arrhenius develops ion theory to explain conductivity in electrolytes. -
Eugene Goldstein discovered positive particles by using a tube filled with hydrogen gas. The positive particle had a charge equal and opposite to the electron. The positive particle was named the proton. -
They were discovered accidentally by Wilhem Roetgen. At the time of the discovery, Roetgen was conducting experiments with cathode ray radiation. It was then that he noticed that the rays are capable of being fixed on opaque black paper. -
Henri Becquerel was studying the fluorescence of pitchblend when he discovered a property of the pitchblend compound. -
J.J. Thomson concluded that all atoms have negative charge and he renamed the cathode rays electrons. -
Hantaro Nagaoka proposes an early nuclear model of the atom, where electrons orbit a dense massive nucleus. -
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch develop the Haber process for making ammonia from its elements, an important fact in industrial chemistry with deep consequences in agriculture. -
Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented bakelite, one of the first commercially successful plastics. -
Robert Millikan discovered the mass of an electron by introducing charged oil droplets into an electrically charged field. -
Antonius van den Broek proposes the idea that the elements on the periodic table are more properly organized by positive nuclear charge rather than atomic weight. -
Frederick Soddy proposes the concept of isotopes, that elements with the same chemical properties may have differing atomic weights. -
Henry Moseley attempts to use x-rays to determine the number of protons in the nucleus of each atom but his try was unsuccessful because the neutron hadn't been discovered yet. -
Jean Beguin publishes the Tyrocinium Chymicum, an early chemistry textbook, and in it draws the first-ever chemical equation. -
Gilbert N. Lewis publishes "The Atom and the Molecule", the foundation of valence bond theory. -
Gilbert N. Lewis and Merle Randall publish Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances, first modern treatise on chemical thermodynamics. -
Wolfgang Pauli develops the exclusion principle, that states that two electrons around no a single nucleus may have the same quantum state. -
Fritz London and Walter Heitler apply quantum mechanics to explain covalent bonding in the hydrogen molecule, which marked the birth of quantum chemistry. -
James Chadwick discovers the neutron. -
Irene Curie and Frederic Joliot-Curie discovered that radioactive elements could be created artificially in the lab with the bombardment of alpha particles on certain elements. -
Wallace Carothers leads a team of chemists who invent nylon, one of the most commercially successful synthetic polymers in history. -
Pyotr Kapitsa, John Allen and Don Misener produce supercooled helium, the first zero-viscosity superfluid. -
Linus Pauling publishes The Nature of the Chemical Bond, a compilation of decades worth of work on chemical bonding. It explains covalent bonding and ionic bonding through electronegativity and resonance. -
Below the football field at the University of Chicago, the United States developed the very first working nuclear fission reactor. The Manhattan Project was in process. -
Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell develop the process of nuclear magnetic resonance, an analytical technique important in elucidating structures of molecules, especially in organic chemistry. -
James D. Watson and Francis Crick propose the structure of DNA, opening the door to the field of molecular biology. -
Neil Bartlett synthesizes xenon hexafluoroplatinate, showing for the first time that the noble gases can form chemical compounds.
