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Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
Robert Boyle is probably best known today as 'the first modern chemist' or ' the father of modern chemistry'. He was a natural philosopher mainly in chemistry, but he worked in many areas such as physics, medicine, earth sciences etc. He was best known for Boyle's law which says that the volume of gas decreases when air pressure increases, and vice versa. Robert Boyle also recognized that elements could be mixed to form compounds. He also thought that air was a mixture not an element -
Henry Cavendish (1731-1810)
Henry Cavendish was a British born scientist. He was best known for an experiment called the Cavendish experiment, in which he found the approximate density of the earth. It was the first experiment to measure the force of gravity between masses in a laboratory. Cavendish also discovered that the the force between two electrical objects changes as they get further apart. He created hydrogen by mixing metals with acid and got a flammable gas which he called 'inflammable air'. -
Joseph Priestly (1733-1804)
Joseph identified 10 new gases: Nitrite oxide, nitrogen dioxide, Nitrous oxide (later called “laughing gas”), hydrogen chloride, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, silicon Tetrafluoride, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon monoxide. He also discovered photosynthesis by doing an experiment where a burning candle was placed in a jar, the flame went out. When he put a mouse in the same jar, it died. He put a plant and the burning candle together in the jar, the mouse stayed alive. Later, he discovered soda water. -
Antoine de Lavoisier (1743-1794)
Lavoisier is best known for recognizing and naming oxygen and hydrogen. He discovered that charcoal and diamond left behind the same gas which he called carbon. He found that charcoal and diamond are the same element only in a different form. Later he identified sulfur as an element. He discovered the law of conservation of mass which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed. He also discovered the role that oxygen plays in the process of burning something. -
Nicolas Leblanc (1742-1806)
In 1775, the academy of sciences offered a prize for the person who could convert salt to soda ash. They believed it was possible because salt and soda ash are simple compounds of sodium. In the process, Leblanc treated salt with sulfuric acid (a strong mineral acid used in fertilizers) which was roasted with limestone. That produced black ash, which contains sodium carbonate (a sodium salt used to make soap or glass) which he took and dissolved in water and crystallized it, and formed soda ash.
