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logical outcome of a predetermined plan.
Scheele was the son of a merchant of Stralsund, Pomerania, which
then belonged to Sweden. As a boy in school he showed so little
aptitude for the study of languages that he was apprenticed to an
apothecary at the age of fourteen. In this work he became at
once greatly interested, and, when not attending to his duties in
the dispensary, he was busy day and night making experiments or
studying books on chemistry. In 1775, still employed as an
apothecary, he moved to Stockholm, and soon after he sent to
Bergman, the leading chemist of Sweden, his first discovery—that
of tartaric acid, which he had isolated from cream of tartar.
This was the beginning of his career of discovery, and from that
time on until his death he sent forth accounts of new discoveries
almost uninterruptedly. Meanwhile he was performing the duties of
an ordinary apothecary, and struggling against poverty. His
treatise upon Air and Fire appeared in 1777. In this remarkable
book he tells of his discovery of oxygen—“empyreal” or
“fire-air,” as he calls it—which he seems to have made
independently and without ever having heard of the previous
discovery by Priestley. In this book, also, he shows that air is
composed chiefly of oxygen and nitrogen gas.
Early in his experimental career Scheele undertook the solution
of the composition of black oxide of manganese, a substance that
had long puzzled the chemists. He not only succeeded in this,
but incidentally in the course of this series of experiments he
discovered oxygen, baryta, and chlorine, the last of far greater
importance, at least commercially, than the real object of his
search. In speaking of the experiment in which the discovery was
made he says:
“When marine (hydrochloric) acid stood over manganese in the cold
it acquired a dark reddish-brown color. As manganese does not
give any colorless solution without uniting with phlogiston
[probably meaning hydrogen], it follows that marine acid can
dissolve it without this principle. But such a solution has a
blue or red color. The color is here more brown than red, the
reason being that the very finest portions of the manganese,
which do not sink so easily, swim in the red solution; for
without these fine particles the solution is red, and red mixed
with black is brown. The manganese has here attached itself so
loosely to acidum salis that the water can precipitate it, and
this precipitate behaves like ordinary manganese. When, now, the
mixture of manganese and spiritus salis was set to digest, there
arose an effervescence and smell of aqua regis.”[6]
The “effervescence” he refers to was chlorine, which he proceeded
to confine in a suitable vessel and examine more fully. He
described it as having a “quite characteristically suffocating
smell,” which was very offensive. He very soon noted the
decolorizing or bleaching effects of this now product, finding
that it decolorized flowers, vegetables, and many other
substances.
Commercially this discovery of chlorine was of enormous
importance, and the practical application of this new chemical in
bleaching cloth soon supplanted the, old process of
crofting—that is, bleaching by spreading the cloth upon the
grass. But although Scheele first pointed out the bleaching
quality of his newly discovered gas, it was the French savant,
Berthollet, who, acting upon Scheele’s discovery that the new gas
would decolorize vegetables and flowers, was led to suspect that
this property might be turned to account in destroying the color
of cloth. In 1785 he read a paper before the Academy of Sciences
of Paris, in which he showed that bleaching by chlorine was
entirely satisfactory, the color but not the substance of the
cloth being affected. He had experimented previously and found
that the chlorine gas was soluble in water and could thus be made
practically available for bleaching purposes. In 1786 James Watt
examined specimens of the bleached cloth made by Berthollet, and
upon his return to England first instituted the process of
practical bleaching. His process, however, was not entirely
satisfactory, and, after undergoing various modifications and
improvements, it was finally made thoroughly practicable by Mr.
Tennant, who hit upon a compound of chlorine and lime—the
chloride of lime—which was a comparatively cheap chemical
product, and answered the purpose better even than chlorine
itself.
To appreciate how momentous this discovery was to cloth
manufacturers, it should be remembered that the old process of
bleaching consumed an entire summer for the whitening of a single
piece of linen; the new process reduced the period to a few
hours. To be sure, lime had been used with fair success previous
to Tennant’s discovery, but successful and practical bleaching by
a solution of chloride of lime was first made possible by him and
through Scheele’s discovery of chlorine.
Until the time of Scheele the great subject of organic chemistry
had remained practically unexplored, but under the touch of his
marvellous inventive genius new methods of isolating and studying
animal and vegetable products were introduced, and a large number
of acids and other organic compounds prepared that had been
hitherto unknown. His explanations of chemical phenomena were
based on the phlogiston theory, in which, like Priestley, he
always, believed. Although in error in this respect, he was,
nevertheless, able to make his discoveries with extremely
accurate interpretations. A brief epitome of the list of some of
his more important discoveries conveys some idea, of his
fertility of mind as well as his industry. In 1780 he discovered
lactic acid,[7] and showed that it was the substance that caused
the acidity of sour milk; and in the same year he discovered
mucic acid. Next followed the discovery of tungstic acid, and in
1783 he added to his list of useful discoveries that of
glycerine. Then in rapid succession came his announcements of the
new vegetable products citric, malic, oxalic, and gallic acids.
Scheele not only made the discoveries, but told the world how he
had made them—how any chemist might have made them if he
chose—for he never considered that he had really discovered any
substance until he had made it, decomposed it, and made it again.
His experiments on Prussian blue are most interesting, not only
because of the enormous amount of work involved and the skill he
displayed in his experiments, but because all the time the
chemist was handling, smelling, and even tasting a compound of
one of the most deadly poisons, ignorant of the fact that the
substance was a dangerous one to handle. His escape from injury
seems almost miraculous; for his experiments, which were most
elaborate, extended over a considerable period of time, during
which he seems to have handled this chemical with impunity.
While only forty years of age and just at the zenith of his fame,
Scheele was stricken by a fatal illness, probably induced by his
ceaseless labor and exposure. It is gratifying to know, however,
that during the last eight or nine years of his life he had been
less bound down by pecuniary difficulties than before, as Bergman
had obtained for him an annual grant from the Academy. But it
was characteristic of the man that, while devoting one-sixth of
the amount of this grant to his personal wants, the remaining
five-sixths was devoted to the expense of his experiments.
LAVOISIER AND THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN CHEMISTRY
The time was ripe for formulating the correct theory of chemical
composition: it needed but the master hand to mould the materials
into the proper shape. The discoveries in chemistry during the
eighteenth century had been far-reaching and revolutionary in
character. A brief review of these discoveries shows how
completely they had subverted the old ideas of chemical elements
and chemical compounds. Of the four substances earth, air, fire,
and water, for many centuries believed to be elementary bodies,
not one has stood the test of the eighteenth-century chemists.
Earth had long since ceased to be regarded as an element, and
water and air had suffered the same fate in this century. And
now at last fire itself, the last of the four “elements” and the
keystone to the phlogiston arch, was shown to be nothing more
than one of the manifestations of the new element, oxygen, and
not “phlogiston” or any other intangible substance.
In this epoch of chemical discoveries England had produced such
mental giants and pioneers in science as Black, Priestley, and
Cavendish; Sweden had given the world Scheele and Bergman, whose
work, added to that of their English confreres, had laid the
broad base of chemistry as a science; but it was for France to
produce a man who gave the final touches to the broad but rough
workmanship of its foundation, and establish it as the science of
modern chemistry. It was for Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
(1743-1794) to gather together, interpret correctly, rename, and
classify the wealth of facts that his immediate predecessors and
contemporaries had given to the world.
The attitude of the mother-countries towards these illustrious
sons is an interesting piece of history. Sweden honored and
rewarded Scheele and Bergman for their efforts; England received
the intellectuality of Cavendish with less appreciation than the
Continent, and a fanatical mob drove Priestley out of the
country; while France, by sending Lavoisier to the guillotine,
demonstrated how dangerous it was, at that time at least, for an
intelligent Frenchman to serve his fellowman and his country
well.
“The revolution brought about by Lavoisier in science,” says
Hoefer, “coincides by a singular act of destiny with another
revolution, much greater indeed, going on then in the political
and social world. Both happened on the same soil, at the same
epoch, among the same people; and both marked the commencement of
a new era in their respective spheres.”[8]
Lavoisier was born in Paris, and being the son of an opulent
family, was educated under the instruction of the best teachers
of the day. With Lacaille he studied mathematics and astronomy;
with Jussieu, botany; and, finally, chemistry under Rouelle. His
first work of importance was a paper on the practical
illumination of the streets of Paris, for which a prize had been
offered by M. de Sartine, the chief of police. This prize was not
awarded to Lavoisier, but his suggestions were of such importance
that the king directed that a gold medal be bestowed upon the
young author at the public sitting of the Academy in April, 1776.
Two years later, at the age of thirty-five, Lavoisier was
admitted a member of the Academy.
In this same year he began to devote himself almost exclusively
to chemical inquiries, and established a laboratory in his home,
fitted with all manner of costly apparatus and chemicals. Here he
was in constant communication with the great men of science of
Paris, to all of whom his doors were thrown open. One of his
first undertakings in this laboratory was to demonstrate that
water could not be converted into earth by repeated
distillations, as was generally advocated; and to show also that
there was no foundation to the existing belief that it was
possible to convert water into a gas so “elastic” as to pass
through the pores of a vessel. He demonstrated the fallaciousness
of both these theories in 1768-1769 by elaborate experiments, a
single investigation of this series occupying one hundred and one
days.
In 1771 he gave the first blow to the phlogiston theory by his
experiments on the calcination of metals. It will be recalled
that one basis for the belief in phlogiston was the fact that
when a metal was calcined it was converted into an ash, giving up
its “phlogiston” in the process. To restore the metal, it was
necessary to add some substance such as wheat or charcoal to the
ash. Lavoisier, in examining this process of restoration, found
that there was always evolved a great quantity of “air,” which
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