Discovery of O, Ar, and H
I am reading my McMurray chemistry textbook and realizing how fascinating the discovery of various elements was. I went looking for videos on the discovery of various elements, the first one being Argon. This video got me to appreciate the importance of publications for disseminating ideas. Rayleigh couldn’t explain the discrepancies between the density of atmospheric nitrogen and nitrogen obtained from a chemical reaction and this puzzle caught Ramsey’s attention. What followed was a series of intricate experiments and hypotheses until the noble gases were well understood years later.
While it’s incredible learning about how many of the elements we know today were discovered because you can see the scientific method at work, it’s fascinating that even scientists struggled to accept new theories that better explained the world than the ones they had long accepted. The story of the discovery of oxygen is one with examples of this phenomenon. The next video goes through the way people probed the inconsistencies in widely accepted ideas (like there being a component of matter called phlogiston that explains why it burns, etc) and how they came up with brilliant experiments to definitively reveal the existence of oxygen.
It’s interesting that oxygen wasn’t even known not that long ago – apparently only about 2 dozen of the 118 elements were known when the declaration of independence was signed. Videos like this are great because they also demonstrate that a good way to combat many anti-science arguments is by acknowledging when they find inconsistencies that aren’t explained by some widely accepted scientific view and observing that such inconsistencies mean that additional research and experimentation is required, not that the scientific method is broken. A basic understanding of the history of science also makes it easier (for me anyway) to study science since it tends to answer a lot of the “why is this important” questions we often have.
I also watched a video on The Origin of Avogadro’s Number and the video below was suggested at end. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a serious of almost 2 dozen videos on the history of chemistry. This is the type of background information that makes learning chemistry fun!
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