Famous People in Periodic Table History

• This is really the last part of the book, some of it is not very detailed mainly because I have not found very much information on the people mentioned and also because it would make sense to leave something for a later version of this book if I ever do another one. I do have an idea for a new book but if I told you it here you might not want this book anymore.

• The idea here is to give a little information out some of the people who have made discoveries in the field of chemistry.

• The short biographies are not intended to be in any great depth just enough to give the reader a general outline to the person and his or her discoveries.

Sir Humphry Davy

• The English chemist Sir Humphry Davy, born on 17th. December 1778, died on 29th. May 1829, invented the safety lamp for miners and was the first to apply electrical current to isolate alkali metals and alkaline earth metals. After receiving a grammar school education, he was apprenticed to a surgeon and began medical studies, turning to chemistry in 1797. He attracted the attention of Thomas Beddoes, who appointed him to the Pneumatic Institution to study the physiological effects of new gases.

• In 1800, Davy published a description of the effects of nitrous oxide and an account of his nearly fatal inhalation of water gas, a mixture of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide. In 1801 he was appointed to the then newly established Royal Institution as lecturer, and in 1802 he was advanced to professor.

• Davy's chemical lectures and demonstrations were brilliantly presented and became a fashionable social event. He also lectured and wrote a book on agricultural chemistry and presented the first systematic geology course offered in England. His first Bakerian Lecture won a prize from Napoleon, even though France and England were at war.

• Davy used electrolysis to obtain elemental Potassium and Sodium in 1807 and Calcium, Strontium, Barium, and Magnesium in 1808. He obtained Boron simultaneously with Joseph Gay-Lussac. He also showed that Oxygen could not be obtained from the substance known as Oxymuriatic acid and proved the substance to be an element, which he named Chlorine.

• This explanation refuted Antoine Lavoisiers oxygen theory of acids. Much of Davy's later research involved making new compounds of Chlorine with Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Oxygen. In 1812 he was knighted, gave a good-bye lecture to his fellow members of the Royal Institution, and married a rich widow.

• He resigned from the Royal Institution in 1813 and traveled on the continent with his wife and young Michael Faraday. Davy returned to London to study flames, and during this time invented what came to be called the Davy safety lamp. He became a baronet in 1818.

Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev

• The Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev, born on 8 February 1834, died on 2 February 1907, formulated the periodic table, one of the most useful and important generalizations of chemistry and of all science.

• The fourteenth and last child of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleyev, a teacher of Russian literature, and Maria Dmitrievna Kornileva, who came from a Siberian merchant family, Mendeleyev was born in Tobolsk, Siberia (which is now called Tyumen Oblast). He enrolled (in 1850) in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Main Pedagogical Institute in Saint Petersburg, from which he graduated with a brilliant record in 1855. He taught (1855-1856) at the Odessa lyceum, where he continued work on the relationships between the crystal forms and the chemical composition of substances.

• In addition to his theoretical research, the application of science to industry and economics remained one of his primary concerns. He then worked (1859-1860) at the University of Heidelberg, where he first collaborated with Robert Bunsen and studied capillary phenomena and the deviations of gases and vapours from the ideal gas laws. In 1860, Mendeleyev discovered the concept of critical temperature and attended the first International Chemical Congress at Karlsruhe, where Stanislao Cannizzaro's views on atomic weights planted the seeds for the concept of the periodic table.

• Mendeleyev served as professor of chemistry at the Saint Petersburg Technological Institute (1864-1866) and at the University of Saint Petersburg (1867-1890), a post that he resigned in protest against the bureaucratic treatment of student petitions for reform. Because he found no suitable text for his students, he wrote his own Principles of Chemistry (1868-1871), which appeared in eight Russian, three English (the last, in 1905, reprinted in 1969), and several French and German editions. The systematisation of ideas required for this book led Mendeleyev to formulate the periodic law in March 1869.

• The law organised the chemical elements known at the time according to their atomic weights and predicted the existence of more elements.

• In subsequent years Mendeleyev refined and modified his law, which was received with considerable scepticism. After Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Lars Fredrik Nilson, and Clemens Winkler discovered the elements Gallium (1875), Scandium (1879), and Germanium (1886), respectively whose existence was predicted by Mendeleyev in 1871 the periodic law was universally accepted Mendeleyev became famous and was showered with honours.

• He was sent (1876) by the Russian government to study petroleum production in the United States. His interests later turned to commercial matters concerned with the national economy. Mendeleyev also worked on the liquefaction of gases the expansion of liquids a theory of solutions a theory of the inorganic origin of petroleum the chemistry of coal Russian weights and measures and the universal ether. He helped found the Russian Chemical Society in 1868. In 1906, a few months before his death, he missed winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry by one vote.

Marie and Pierre Curie

• Pierre and Marie Curie are best known for their pioneering work in the study of Radioactivity, which led to their discovery in 1898 of the elements Radium and Polonium. Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, on 7th Nov 1867, died 3rd July 1934, spent many impoverished years as a teacher and governess before she joined her sister Bronia in Paris in order to study mathematics and physics at the Sorbonne, earning degrees in both subjects in 1893 and 1894. In the spring of the latter year she met the physicist Pierre Curie. They married a year later, and Marie subsequently gave birth to two daughters, Irene (1897) and Eve (1904).

• Pierre Curie, born 15th May 1859, died 19th April 1906, obtained his doctorate in the year of his marriage, but he had already distinguished himself in the study of the properties of crystals. He discovered the phenomenon of Piezoelectricity, whereby changes in the volume of certain crystals excite small electric potentials. Along with work on crystal symmetry Pierre Curie studied the magnetic properties of materials and constructed a torsion balance with a tolerance of 0.01 mg. He discovered that the magnetic susceptibility of paramagnetic materials is inversely proportional to the absolute temperature (Weiss-Curie's law) and that there exists a critical temperature above which the magnetic properties disappear.

• Since 1882, Pierre had headed the laboratory at the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle in Paris, and it was here that both Marie and Pierre conTinued to work after their marriage. For her doctoral thesis, Madame Curie decided to study the mysterious radiation that had been discovered in 1896 by Henri Becquerel. With the aid of an electrometer built by Pierre and Jacques, Marie measured the strength of the radiation emitted from uranium compounds and found it proportional to the Uranium content, constant over a long period of time, and uninfluenced by external conditions. She detected a similar immutable radiation in the compounds of Thorium. While checking these results, she made the unexpected discovery that Uranium pitchblende and the mineral chalcolite emitted about four times as much radiation as could be expected from their Uranium content. In 1898 she therefore drew the revolutionary conclusion that pitchblende contains a small amount of an unknown radiating element.

• Pierre Curie immediately understood the importance of this supposition and joined his wife's work. In the course of their research over the next year, they discovered two new spontaneously radiating elements, which they named Polonium (after Marie's native country Poland) and Radium. A third element, Actinium, was discovered by their colleague Andre Debierne. They now began the tedious and monumental task of isolating these elements so that their chemical properties could be determined.

• In 1903, Marie Curie obtained her doctorate for a thesis on radioactive substances, and with her husband and Henri Becquerel she won the Nobel Prize for physics for the joint discovery of radioactivity. The financial aspect of this prize finally relieved the Curies of material hardship. The following year Pierre was appointed professor at the Sorbonne, and Marie became his assistant. She was deeply affected when Pierre died after being struck by a truck on a Paris street. She overcame this blow only by putting all her energy into the scientific work that they had begun together. The Sorbonne provided the opportunity by offering her the post that Pierre had held of lecturer and head of the laboratory. She thus became the first female lecturer at the Sorbonne, and in 1908 she was appointed professor. For the isolation of pure Radium, Marie Curie received a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time for chemistry.

• During World War I, Madame Curie dedicated herself entirely to the development of the use of X-rays in medicine. In 1918 she took upon herself the direction of the scientific department of the Radium Institute, which she had planned with her husband, and where her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie worked with her husband Frederic Joliot. Marie's research for the rest of her life was dedicated to the chemistry of radioactive materials and their medical applications. She frequently lectured abroad, and she labored to establish international scholarships for scientists. Her death, on July 4, 1934, of leukemia was undoubtedly caused by prolonged exposure to radiation.

• The work of Marie and Pierre Curie, which by its nature dealt with changes in the atomic nucleus, led the way toward the modern understanding of the atom as an entity that can be split to release enormous energy.

John Dalton

• The English teacher, chemist, and physicist John Dalton, born on 6th September 1766 and died on 27th July 1844, is best known for developing the ancient concept of Atoms into a scientific theory that has become a foundation of modern chemistry. He considered himself primarily a teacher and earned his living by teaching and lecturing until 1833, when he was awarded an annual civil pension. A self-taught experimenter, he devised simple but effective apparatus for his well-planned tests. Although authors have emphasised the crudeness of his results, many of his data are remarkably accurate.

• Throughout his life Dalton was interested in the Earth's atmosphere, and he recorded more than 200,000 atmospheric observations in his notebooks. These observations led Dalton to study gases, and from the results of his experiments he was able to formulate his atomic theory. In a book on meteorology, he concluded that the aurora borealis is a magnetic phenomenon; he also explained the condensation of dew and gave a table of vapour pressures of water at various temperatures. Dalton was the first to publish the generalisation that all gases initially at the same temperature expand equally on going to the same higher temperature. His law of partial pressures was included in a paper in 1803 on gas solubility’s.

• Dalton's atomic theory was expressed in public lectures in 1803, and later in his New System of Chemical Philosophy in 1808. Many scientists, including William Higgins, had considered matter to be made of atoms, but Dalton provided a model from which definite predictions could be made.

• This theory incorporated additional features that have since been discarded, but the realisation that each atom has a characteristic mass and that atoms of elements are unchanged in chemical processes has served chemists to the present day.

Enrico Fermi

• The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, was born on the 29th September 1901, and died on the 28th November 1954 he is best known as a central figure in the Manhattan project to build the first Atomic bomb.

• Fermi received his doctorate from the University of Pisa in 1922. After working under Max Born at Gottingen and Paul Ehrenfest at Leiden, he returned to Italy in 1926 and became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Rome. In 1938, on the eve of World War II, he escaped to the United States.

• Fermi's early work on the statistical distribution of elementary particles led him to divide these atomic constituents into two groups, known as fermions and bosons, depending on their spin characteristics. This division is now accepted as standard.

• His subsequent work on radioactivity and atomic structure involved experiments on the production of artificial radioactivity by bombarding matter with neutrons, for which he received the 1938 Nobel Prize for physics. In collaboration with other eminent scientists, Fermi experimented with nuclear fission at Columbia University.

• This work culminated in the first sustained nuclear reaction, on 2nd December 1942, at the University of Chicago. Further work at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory led to the construction of the Atomic bomb. After the war, Fermi accepted a post at the newly established Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and continued his work in the field of neutron physics.

Glenn T Seaborg

• The American chemist Glenn Theodore Seaborg, born Ishpeming, Mich, 19th April 1912, shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Edwin McMillan for his participation in the discovery of most of the transuranium elements. Seaborg received his Ph.D. in 1937 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he remained and did his early work on the isotopes of common elements.

• He later worked with McMillan, who isolated in 1940 Neptunium with the atomic number 93, the first element beyond Uranium. Seaborg and his associates later isolated the next transuranium element, Plutonium. They also found a Plutonium isotope, Pu 239, which promised to yield more fission energy than Uranium.

• In 1942, Seaborg moved from Berkeley to the University of Chicago to find ways of producing Plutonium for the atomic-bomb project. His group discovered (1944) two new elements, Americium (95) and Curium (96) these discoveries helped to confirm Seaborg's hypothesis that the transuranium elements resembled each other and so formed a transition series the Actinide series similar to the Lanthanide series of rare earths.

• In 1946 he returned to Berkeley, and during the next 12 years he and his collaborators discovered six more transuranium elements Berkelium (97) in 1949, Californium (98) in 1950, Einsteinium (99) in 1952, Fermium (100) in 1953, Mendelevium (101) in 1955, and Nobelium (102) in 1958.

• The discovery of these elements was made possible by new particle accelerators that allowed heavy ions to be used as projectiles. Seaborg was named in 1958 chancellor of the Berkeley campus in 1961 he became the first scientist to be chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in 1971, where he co-discovered in 1974 element 106.

Robert Boyle

• The English natural philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle, was born on the 25th January, 1627, and died on the 30th December 1691, made important contributions to experimental chemistry and is known for his ideal-gas law, subsequently termed Boyle's law.

• Boyle was born into an affluent English aristocratic family and received a conventional gentleman's education.

• He became interested in medicine and the new science of Galileo and studied chemistry.

• Boyle was a founder and an influential fellow of the royal society, was continuously active in scientific affairs, and wrote prolifically on science, philosophy, and theology.

• Boyle's earliest publication was on the physical properties of air, from which he derived his law that the volume of a given amount of a gas varies inversely with pressure.

• His work in chemistry was aimed at establishing it as a rational theoretical science on the basis of a mechanistic theory of matter.

• Boyle was a skillful experimenter who insisted that experimentation was an essential part of scientific proof, an approach that influenced Sir Isaac Newton and the methodology of many later scientists.

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier

• The French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, was born on 26th August 1743, died on the 8th. May 1794, was the founder of modern chemistry. Although he discovered no new substances and devised few new preparations, he described his experiments and synthesised chemical knowledge in his revolutionary textbook Elements of Chemistry in 1789 with the English translation in 1790. In this textbook he presented a new system of chemistry that was based on an essentially modern concept of chemical elements and that made extensive use of the conservation of mass in chemical reactions. Formerly chemical theory had been based on either three or four elements, and negative mass was considered a possibility by some chemists.

• Lavoisier demonstrated experimentally that Oxygen gas in the air is involved in combustion, calcination (rusting), and respiration, thus disproving Georg stahl's phlogiston theory. The basic principles of the new nomenclature devised in collaboration with Claude Louis berthollet, Antoine de fourcroy, and Guyton de Morveau, are still used. Among Lavoisier's major mistakes were the exaggerated importance he ascribed to the role of Oxygen in acids and the inclusion of a weightless "heat substance" in his list of chemical elements.

• Lavoisier's interest in science was developed during his education 1754-1761 at the College Mazarin, where he studied mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and botany, and during a period 1761-1764 of legal studies (which was a family tradition). When he listened to lectures on geology by Jean Etienne Guettard (1715-1786) and on chemistry by Guillaume Francois Rouelle (1703-1770), both members of the Academie Royale des Sciences. Lavoisier then worked for Guettard for 3 years, collecting details for a geologic map of France and participating in a geological survey in 1767 of Alsace and Lorraine.

• His first paper in 1764 on chemistry dealt with the properties of gypsum and the settling of plaster of Paris. Another early essay, on the problem of lighting the streets of cities and large towns, was awarded a Gold medal by the king of France.

• Lavoisier was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1768, the same year that he entered the Ferme Generale, a private firm that collected certain taxes for the government. He served between 1775 and 1791 on the Royal Gunpowder Administration and became a director of the Discount Bank and an administrator of the national treasury. During the period of the French Revolution Lavoisier served as an alternate deputy for the nobility he had inherited a purchased title from his father in 1775 at the meeting of the Estates General published reports on the state of French finances and on French agricultural resources. Drafted with others a scheme for reforming the French educational system and participated with other Academy members in establishing the metric system of weights and measures. Nevertheless, Lavoisier, a moderate constitutionalist, was subjected to attacks by radicals, such as Jean Paul Marat, and his involvement with the unpopular Ferme Generale led to his execution by guillotine during the Reign of Terror.

Jons Jakob Berzelius

• The Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, was born on the 20th August 1779, died on the 7th August 1848.

• Jons was one of the dominant figures in chemistry during the first half of the 19th century.

• His textbook, his system of chemical symbols, his dualistic electrochemical theory, his yearly review of chemical progress from 1821 to 1848, and his compilation of the first reasonably accurate atomic weight table, made him the ultimate chemical authority of his times.

• He introduced the use of filter paper into analytical chemistry and discovered several elements including Selenium in 1818, Silicon in about 1824, and Thorium in 1829.

• He introduced many terms used in chemistry today; his increasingly entrenched scientific conservatism in later life impeded progress, however.

David Alter

• The American physician, inventor, and physicist David Alter was Born on 3rd. December 1807 and died on 18th. September1881, pointed out in 1854 and also in 1855 that each chemical element has a characteristic spectrum and that the elements present in astronomical bodies could be ascertained through spectral analysis.

• In this he anticipated the work of Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen, who, in 1859, put spectroscopy on a firm scientific foundation.

Antoine Henri Becquerel

• The French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel was on born 15th. December 1852 and died on 25th. August 1908, he is known for his discovery of radioactivity in 1896, for which he shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for physics with Marie and Pierre Curie.

• Among a variety of luminescent crystals, Becquerel found that only those containing Uranium emitted radiation naturally.

• This significant discovery opened the way to nuclear physics. He subsequently discovered that the radiations of Radium comprise electrons, and he was the first to supply experimental evidence of the phenomenon of radioactive transformation.

• He was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1889 and appointed professor of physics at the Museum of Natural History in 1892 and the Ecole Polytechnique in 1895.

Frederick Soddy

• The British physicist Frederick Soddy was born on 2nd. September 1877 and died on 22nd. September 1956, received in 1921 the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the conception of isotopes and the displacement law of radioactive change.

• With Ernest Rutherford he developed the disintegration theory of radioactivity, which explained radioactivity as the decay of atoms to form other elements.

• Soddy proposed the isotope concept that atoms could have the same chemical identity but different atomic weights.

• His displacement law of radioactive change suggests that an element emitting an alpha particle becomes a new element with a lower atomic number, whereas emission of a beta particle raises the element's atomic number.

Theodore William Richards

• The American chemist Theodore William Richards, born in Germantown, Pa. on the 31st January. 1868, died on 2nd. April 1928, was recognised during his lifetime as the leading authority in atomic-weight determinations.

• A Harvard University graduate, he served as full professor at Harvard from 1901 to 1928. Using superior gravimetric methods and applying physicochemical principles, he determined the atomic weights of a large number of elements with an accuracy never surpassed.

• His detection of the varying atomic weight of lead in 1913 coincided with the discovery of isotopes by Frederick Soddy.

• Richards was awarded the 1914 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work.

Francis William Aston

• The English physicist and chemist Francis William Aston, was born on 1st. September 1877, and died on 20th. November 1945, discovered in 1919 that stable elements of low atomic weight are mixtures of isotopes.

• Using a mass spectrograph, which he developed while working with Sir Joseph John Thomson in Cambridge, and for which he received the 1922 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

• Aston also found that the masses of most atoms could be expressed as whole numbers when compared with Oxygen (Which has a mass of 16).

• With a more accurate spectrograph, however, Aston detected in 1927 a slight deviation from this whole-number rule.

• By graphing an index of the deviation also called the packing fraction against the closest whole-number mass of an element, Aston derived important information concerning its structure and stability.

William Ramsay

• William Ramsay was born in 1852 and died in 1916

• British chemist, born in Glasgow, Scotland professor Bristol University 1880-87, University of London 1887-1913.

• William Ramsay was the discoverer of Helium, Neon, Krypton, Xenon which are all inert gases.

• Co-discoverer of argon; research in radioactivity led to new theory of transmutation of elements; knighted 1902

• He received in 1904 the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Morris William Travers

• Travers was born in 1872 and died in 1961.

• Travers was an English chemist, born in London.

• Travers was a co-discoverer with William Ramsay of Neon, Krypton, and Xenon and was an authority on glass technology.

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff

• Born 1824 died in 1887

• German physicist, born in Konigsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia)

• Developed spectrum analysis and discovered cesium and Rubidium with Bunsen

• Explained the Fraunhofer lines; professor of physics at Heidelberg 1854-1874, at Berlin in 1874-1887

Joseph Norman Lockyer

• Born 1836 died in 1920

• British astronomer and physicist, born in Rugby, England

• Lockyer was a Pioneer in application of the spectroscope to sun and stars.

• Explained sunspots between 1870 and 1905 and conducted eight British expeditions for observing total solar eclipses.

Pierre Jules-Cesar Janssen

• Born 1824 died in 1907

• French astronomer, born in Paris France

• Discoverer of Helium in the Sun.

• Founded and directed an observatory on Mont Blanc 1893.