Exactly today August 1, 1774, a scientist named Joseph Priestley succeeded in discovering the element oxygen. At that time Priestley was able to answer why and how things caught fire.
The discovery of oxygen at that time succeeded in changing the view of humans in seeing the environment. Experts recognize that there is more than one component to air.
The nature of oxygen and nitrogen as components of air led to the development of the phlogiston theory of the combustion process, which chemists had been thinking about for a century.
Discovery of oxygen
Summarized from various sources, in August 1774, while conducting experiments in southern England, Priestley succeeded in separating a gas that made a candle flame shine brighter, resulting from sunlight focused using a burning lens on a sample of mercury(II) oxide.
Then, he put 60 milliliters of the gas and a mouse in a glass container. The rats were able to survive twice as long as those placed in an ordinary air-filled container.
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In fact, Priestley himself inhaled the gas, and he said he felt refreshed for a while afterward. Priestley actually discovered oxygen gas.
However, he referred to the gas as "phlogisticated air", thinking that he had discovered ordinary air that did not contain phlogiston. It turned out that Priestley's conclusion was wrong.
However, many people still consider his findings as the pinnacle of his achievements. In October of the same year, he accompanied his companion, Lord Shelburne, on a trip to Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and France.
While he was in Paris, he told the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier how he got the new "air". The meeting between these two scientists was very important for future chemists.
Lavoisier immediately repeated Priestley's experiments and, between 1775 and 1780, undertook intensive investigations from which he derived the nature of the "air", recognized it as "active" air in the atmosphere, interpreted its role in combustion and respiration, and gave the name "air". the new one, namely oxygen (O2).
After returning to Great Britain in January 1775, he continued his experiments and discovered "vitriolic acid air" (sulfur dioxide, SO2).
In March he wrote on a number of new "air" related figures he had discovered in August. One of the letters was read to the Royal Society, and a paper outlining the discovery, entitled "An Account of further Discoveries in Air", was published in the Royal Society journal, Philosophical Transactions.
Priestley compiled his paper on oxygen and his other discoveries in the second volume of Experiments and Observations on Air, published in 1776.
His paper recounts these discoveries in chronological order, attributing the long delay between the experiment and the confusion he had at its inception. Therefore, it is difficult to determine exactly when Priestley "discovered" oxygen.
This date is very important because both Lavoisier and the Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele also had strong claims to the discovery of oxygen, Scheele being the first to isolate this gas (although he published his discovery after Priestley) and Lavoisier being the first to describe this gas as " the air itself without any disturbance" which was pure (i.e., the first to explain oxygen without the phlogiston theory).
In his paper "Observations on Respiration and the Use of the Blood", Priestley was the first to suggest a relationship between blood and air, although he did so using the phlogiston theory.
In typical Priestley fashion, he introduces his paper with a history of the study of respiration. One year later, strongly influenced by Priestley, Lavoisier also discussed the topic of respiration at the Académie des sciences.
Lavoisier's work was the beginning of a long discovery that led to papers on oxygen respiration and culminated in the replacement of the phlogiston theory and the founding of modern chemistry.
Priestley's brief history
Priestley was born in Yorkshire England to a modest family. He was the eldest son of a wool maker. Her mother died after giving birth to six children in six years.
Since childhood, Priestley loved to study. Apart from formal education at a local school, he also studied mathematics and philosophy, and a variety of languages including Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German and several Middle Eastern languages.
Priestley's extraordinary ability was actually able to take him to leading universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. But as an ordinary person, Priestley could not apply to the university, so he entered Daventry Academy.
During his lifetime, Priestley was known as an outspoken man for his courage in supporting the American and French revolutions. Because of this attitude, Priestley was in danger. He then left England in 1794. He continued his research in America until the end of his life.