All Questions
Tagged with terminology chemistry
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A brief history of "delocalization" of electrons
I have been studying the concepts of "resonance" and "mesomerism" recently and a common principle of these concepts is the "delocalization" (of electrons, molecular ...
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Were molecules called atoms in the 19th century?
E.g. a quote from Justus von Liebig, 17th Chemical Letter, 1858, in German:
Wir können ein Stück Zucker, auch wenn wir es noch so fein reiben, nicht flüssig machen, noch viel weniger können wir durch ...
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History and origin of the Iso-, Sec-, Tert- and Neo- prefixes?
I have studied the prefixes "Iso-", "Sec-", "Tert-" and "Neo-" for a long time in chemistry but wonder where they originate from i.e. where is the place (the ...
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How did the concept of pH originate and develop?
Background & My research
To begin I did some research to find a few articles on the history of pH namely "The Symbol for pH"- William B. Jensen, "One-Hundred Years of pH" - ...
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Who coined the term "sulphuretted hydrogen"?
Hydrogen sulfide was previously named "sulphuretted hydrogen" but I can't find the person who named/coined it. Although Carl Wilhelm Scheele is credited to have discovered and isolated the ...
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When was the term "Sparingly soluble" first introduced in chemistry?
This question is inspired from: Why do we call salts such as AgCl sparingly soluble?
The extent of solubility can be expressed as descriptive terms. U.S. Pharmacopoeia has made the following ...
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When was mercury given its name?
The Wikipedia page for mercury says that it was named after the Roman god because of his speed and mobility. When did the name mercury start to be used to designate the metal?
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How did early physicists experimentally assign electronic transitions in atoms?
The spectrum of hydrogen was very well studied by the mid-19th century. However, if one were doing experimental spectroscopy for more complex atoms, one would see plenty of spectral lines in the ...
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Is it a historical coincidence that relative atomic weights by chemical methods and mass spectrometry are very close?
The concept of relative atomic weight originated from measuring the combining weight of hydrogen with a certain element. In the simplification process H was taken as unity (18th, 19th and 20th century)...
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How did the early chemists determine the atomic weight of hydrogen?
In early history, the relative atomic weight of hydrogen was assigned as 1 (exactly) and all other elements were compared against hydrogen. What is difficult to find who determined the absolute atomic ...
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How did the early chemists make a connection between gram formula weight with 1 mole and Avogadro's number?
According to one historian Mustafa Sarikaya's article in Foundations of Chemistry DOI 10.1007/s10698-011-9128-7, the mole concept was introduced to chemistry earlier than Avogadro’s number. The mole ...
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Was the value of the mole invented or discovered in chemistry?
For example, $\pi$ is not an invention, it is a discovery which was natural, that is ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But when we define a meter it is not a natural value it is ...
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Origins of molecular orbital diagrams?
Does anyone remember who proposed molecular diagrams for simple molecules as taught today in most general chemistry texts? I cannot access Hund's original article, however, Mulliken's early articles ...
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Earliest known usage of letter gamma "Γ" for reducible representation in group theory
Does any know the earliest known usage of the Greek letter gamma for showing a reducible representation of a group? This symbolism is commonly used in character tables in chemical applications of ...
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What is the etymology of lower case p as the operator for the negative of the common logarithm?
In high school we were taught that the formula for pH is the negative of the common logarithm of hydrogen ion concentration: pH = -log[H+].
It wasn't until I took organic chemistry that the "acid ...
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