Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything Chapter 7

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything Chapter 7

Chapter 7 of Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' delves into the fascinating world of chemistry, exploring the evolution of the science from ancient alchemy to modern chemical principles. Bryson highlights key figures such as Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who revolutionized the field by introducing the concept of conservation of mass. The chapter also discusses the discovery of elements and the development of the periodic table, emphasizing the contributions of scientists like Dmitri Mendeleyev. This chapter is essential for readers interested in the history of science and the foundational concepts of chemistry.

Key Points

  • Explores the transition from alchemy to modern chemistry
  • Highlights the contributions of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier to chemical science
  • Discusses the significance of the conservation of mass principle
  • Covers the development of the periodic table by Dmitri Mendeleyev
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7 ELEMENTAL MATTERS
CHEMISTRY AS AN earnest and respectable science is often said to date from 1661, when
Robert Boyle of Oxford published The Sceptical Chymist —the first work to distinguish
between chemists and alchemists—but it was a slow and often erratic transition. Into the
eighteenth century scholars could feel oddly comfortable in both camps—like the German
Johann Becher, who produced an unexceptionable work on mineralogy called Physica
Subterranea , but who also was certain that, given the right materials, he could make himself
invisible.
Perhaps nothing better typifies the strange and often accidental nature of chemical science
in its early days than a discovery made by a German named Hennig Brand in 1675. Brand
became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of
color seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human
urine, which he kept for months in his cellar. By various recondite processes, he converted the
urine first into a noxious paste and then into a translucent waxy substance. None of it yielded
gold, of course, but a strange and interesting thing did happen. After a time, the substance
began to glow. Moreover, when exposed to air, it often spontaneously burst into flame.
The commercial potential for the stuff—which soon became known as phosphorus, from
Greek and Latin roots meaning “light bearing”—was not lost on eager businesspeople, but the
difficulties of manufacture made it too costly to exploit. An ounce of phosphorus retailed for
six guineas—perhaps five hundred dollars in today’s money—or more than gold.
At first, soldiers were called on to provide the raw material, but such an arrangement was
hardly conducive to industrial-scale production. In the 1750s a Swedish chemist named Karl
(or Carl) Scheele devised a way to manufacture phosphorus in bulk without the slop or smell
of urine. It was largely because of this mastery of phosphorus that Sweden became, and
remains, a leading producer of matches.
Scheele was both an extraordinary and extraordinarily luckless fellow. A poor pharmacist
with little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements—chlorine, fluorine,
manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen—and got credit for none of
them. In every case, his finds were either overlooked or made it into publication after
someone else had made the same discovery independently. He also discovered many useful
compounds, among them ammonia, glycerin, and tannic acid, and was the first to see the
commercial potential of chlorine as a bleach—all breakthroughs that made other people
extremely wealthy.
Scheele’s one notable shortcoming was a curious insistence on tasting a little of everything
he worked with, including such notoriously disagreeable substances as mercury, prussic acid
(another of his discoveries), and hydrocyanic acid—a compound so famously poisonous that
150 years later Erwin Schrödinger chose it as his toxin of choice in a famous thought
experiment (see page 146). Scheele’s rashness eventually caught up with him. In 1786, aged
just forty-three, he was found dead at his workbench surrounded by an array of toxic
chemicals, any one of which could have accounted for the stunned and terminal look on his
face.
Were the world just and Swedish-speaking, Scheele would have enjoyed universal acclaim.
Instead credit has tended to lodge with more celebrated chemists, mostly from the English-
speaking world. Scheele discovered oxygen in 1772, but for various heartbreakingly
complicated reasons could not get his paper published in a timely manner. Instead credit went
to Joseph Priestley, who discovered the same element independently, but latterly, in the
summer of 1774. Even more remarkable was Scheele’s failure to receive credit for the
discovery of chlorine. Nearly all textbooks still attribute chlorine’s discovery to Humphry
Davy, who did indeed find it, but thirty-six years after Scheele had.
Although chemistry had come a long way in the century that separated Newton and Boyle
from Scheele and Priestley and Henry Cavendish, it still had a long way to go. Right up to the
closing years of the eighteenth century (and in Priestley’s case a little beyond) scientists
everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just
weren’t there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous
exhalations, and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent
in combustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan
vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life. No one knew where this ethereal essence
lay, but two things seemed probable: that you could enliven it with a jolt of electricity (a
notion Mary Shelley exploited to full effect in her novel Frankenstein ) and that it existed in
some substances but not others, which is why we ended up with two branches of chemistry:
organic (for those substances that were thought to have it) and inorganic (for those that did
not).
Someone of insight was needed to thrust chemistry into the modern age, and it was the
French who provided him. His name was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Born in 1743, Lavoisier
was a member of the minor nobility (his father had purchased a title for the family). In 1768,
he bought a practicing share in a deeply despised institution called the Ferme Générale (or
General Farm), which collected taxes and fees on behalf of the government. Although
Lavoisier himself was by all accounts mild and fair-minded, the company he worked for was
neither. For one thing, it did not tax the rich but only the poor, and then often arbitrarily. For
Lavoisier, the appeal of the institution was that it provided him with the wealth to follow his
principal devotion, science. At his peak, his personal earnings reached 150,000 livres a year—
perhaps $20 million in today’s money.
Three years after embarking on this lucrative career path, he married the fourteen-year-old
daughter of one of his bosses. The marriage was a meeting of hearts and minds both. Madame
Lavoisier had an incisive intellect and soon was working productively alongside her husband.
Despite the demands of his job and busy social life, they managed to put in five hours of
science on most days—two in the early morning and three in the evening—as well as the
whole of Sunday, which they called their jour de bonheur (day of happiness). Somehow
Lavoisier also found the time to be commissioner of gunpowder, supervise the building of a
wall around Paris to deter smugglers, help found the metric system, and coauthor the
handbook Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique , which became the bible for agreeing on the
names of the elements.
As a leading member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, he was also required to take an
informed and active interest in whatever was topical—hypnotism, prison reform, the
respiration of insects, the water supply of Paris. It was in such a capacity in 1780 that
Lavoisier made some dismissive remarks about a new theory of combustion that had been
submitted to the academy by a hopeful young scientist. The theory was indeed wrong, but the
scientist never forgave him. His name was Jean-Paul Marat.
The one thing Lavoisier never did was discover an element. At a time when it seemed as if
almost anybody with a beaker, a flame, and some interesting powders could discover
something new—and when, not incidentally, some two-thirds of the elements were yet to be
found—Lavoisier failed to uncover a single one. It certainly wasn’t for want of beakers.
Lavoisier had thirteen thousand of them in what was, to an almost preposterous degree, the
finest private laboratory in existence.
Instead he took the discoveries of others and made sense of them. He threw out phlogiston
and mephitic airs. He identified oxygen and hydrogen for what they were and gave them both
their modern names. In short, he helped to bring rigor, clarity, and method to chemistry.
And his fancy equipment did in fact come in very handy. For years, he and Madame
Lavoisier occupied themselves with extremely exacting studies requiring the finest
measurements. They determined, for instance, that a rusting object doesn’t lose weight, as
everyone had long assumed, but gains weight—an extraordinary discovery. Somehow as it
rusted the object was attracting elemental particles from the air. It was the first realization that
matter can be transformed but not eliminated. If you burned this book now, its matter would
be changed to ash and smoke, but the net amount of stuff in the universe would be the same.
This became known as the conservation of mass, and it was a revolutionary concept.
Unfortunately, it coincided with another type of revolution—the French one—and for this one
Lavoisier was entirely on the wrong side.
Not only was he a member of the hated Ferme Générale, but he had enthusiastically built
the wall that enclosed Paris—an edifice so loathed that it was the first thing attacked by the
rebellious citizens. Capitalizing on this, in 1791 Marat, now a leading voice in the National
Assembly, denounced Lavoisier and suggested that it was well past time for his hanging.
Soon afterward the Ferme Générale was shut down. Not long after this Marat was murdered
in his bath by an aggrieved young woman named Charlotte Corday, but by this time it was too
late for Lavoisier.
In 1793, the Reign of Terror, already intense, ratcheted up to a higher gear. In October
Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine. The following month, as Lavoisier and his wife
were making tardy plans to slip away to Scotland, Lavoisier was arrested. In May he and
thirty-one fellow farmers-general were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal (in a
courtroom presided over by a bust of Marat). Eight were granted acquittals, but Lavoisier and
the others were taken directly to the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde),
site of the busiest of French guillotines. Lavoisier watched his father-in-law beheaded, then
stepped up and accepted his fate. Less than three months later, on July 27, Robespierre
himself was dispatched in the same way and in the same place, and the Reign of Terror
swiftly ended.
A hundred years after his death, a statue of Lavoisier was erected in Paris and much
admired until someone pointed out that it looked nothing like him. Under questioning the
sculptor admitted that he had used the head of the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis
de Condorcet—apparently he had a spare—in the hope that no one would notice or, having
noticed, would care. In the second regard he was correct. The statue of Lavoisier-cum-
Condorcet was allowed to remain in place for another half century until the Second World
War when, one morning, it was taken away and melted down for scrap.
In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing
gas, after it was discovered that its use “was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling.” For
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FAQs of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything Chapter 7

What are the main themes in Chapter 7 of Bryson's book?
Chapter 7 focuses on the history and development of chemistry, emphasizing the transition from alchemy to a rigorous scientific discipline. Bryson discusses how early chemists, like Hennig Brand and Karl Scheele, made significant discoveries despite the lack of modern scientific methods. The chapter also highlights the importance of key figures such as Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Dmitri Mendeleyev, who laid the groundwork for modern chemistry through their groundbreaking work.
Who was Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and what did he contribute to chemistry?
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier is often referred to as the father of modern chemistry due to his systematic approach to chemical science. He introduced the law of conservation of mass, which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed in a chemical reaction. Lavoisier also played a crucial role in naming oxygen and hydrogen, and he helped develop a coherent chemical nomenclature that is still in use today. His work laid the foundation for future advancements in chemistry.
How did Dmitri Mendeleyev contribute to the field of chemistry?
Dmitri Mendeleyev is best known for creating the periodic table of elements, which organized known elements based on their atomic weight and chemical properties. His table not only categorized elements but also predicted the existence and properties of undiscovered elements, showcasing the periodic nature of elemental properties. Mendeleyev's work provided a framework that has been fundamental to the study of chemistry and remains crucial for understanding elemental relationships.
What is the significance of the conservation of mass principle?
The conservation of mass principle, introduced by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, states that in a closed system, the mass of reactants equals the mass of products in a chemical reaction. This principle was revolutionary because it challenged previous notions that mass could be lost or gained during reactions. It established a foundation for modern chemistry, emphasizing the importance of quantitative measurements and leading to more precise chemical equations and reactions.
What role did early chemists play in the development of modern chemistry?
Early chemists, such as Hennig Brand and Karl Scheele, played pivotal roles in the transition from alchemical practices to systematic scientific methods. Their discoveries, including phosphorus and various elements, laid the groundwork for future research and experimentation in chemistry. Despite their lack of recognition during their lifetimes, their contributions helped shape the understanding of chemical processes and the nature of matter.

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