History of Chemistry: What Brought About Modern Chemistry

Chemistry has been around since the earth was created, a time when computers, televisions, or simple beakers weren’t invented yet. Chemistry was always around, but it wasn’t considered a science until modern chemistry was discovered. Modern chemistry has only been around for centuries, where author Robert Boyle published The Skeptical Chemist in 1661. Soon after Robert’s publication, Antoine Lavoisier developed the law of conservation of mass, and that was the start of modern chemistry being considered a science. After this, chemistry was changed forever.

Starting in the prehistoric era, chemistry was used at first to explain religious things, like known metals were compared to heavenly bodies. 1,330 years later Democritus said that the atom was the simplest of all matter, a statement that was the first in its kind when dealing with matter. One hundred and thirty years later, Aristotle declares the existence of the four elements, fire, water, air, and earth. He also said matter had four properties, hot, cold, dry, and wet. All these things happened in the time between the Prehistoric times, and the Beginning of the Christian Era. Chemistry was considered black magic in this time period.

Soon after alchemy was used, which was using science methods to turn ordinary metals to gold. The start of alchemy happened when alchemists, using influence from Aristotle, attempted to change cheap metals to gold, something that was an unheard of idea at the time, and they used something called a Philosopher’s Stone to do. Pope John XXII soon after issued an order saying that gold making was forbidden, but that didn’t stop the gold makers. The gold makers continued to try to create gold from simple and known metals, and they had no success do...

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... television would have been halted extremely if not for the invention of these tubes. Soon I feel that the vacuum tube will lead to even bigger things, with even more innovations in the field of vacuum tubes, and I feel like it will only get bigger from here on out.

Chemistry is a huge topic, with history dating all the back to BC, a time where the country United States wasn’t even thought about yet, and now one of the few things that have advanced so far since that time period, has been chemistry. Starting from the thought of Black Magic and Alchemy being real all the way to now where Chemistry is huge with new discoveries every year, you can only begin to scratch the surface on what impact chemistry has had in our society. Chemistry is a subject that will forever be expanding, and I feel that right now we have covered very little about the mystery of chemistry.