The ‘game changers’ of chemistry: discoveries which have changed the world

Which discoveries in chemistry were so significant that they have changed the world? Here we present some of the best advances over the course of the centuries: authentic turning points which have literally transformed the notions of the entire world.

• Oxygen 

Discovered almost simultaneously by Joseph Priestley and by Carl Welhelm Scheele in the seventeen hundreds, when they heated mercury oxide in a test tube.

• Atomic theory

First put forward in the early eighteen hundreds by John Dalton based on three fundamental laws of chemistry.  It allows us to quantify invisible atoms in measurable amounts like the volume of a gas.

• Distinction between atoms and molecules

Among the most important breakthroughs in chemistry, Amedeo Avogadro’s discovery in 1810 is absolutely fundamental:  we finally understood that molecules are formed of atoms.

• Urea Synthesis

In 1828 Friedrich Wohler eliminated the boundaries between organic and inorganic chemistry, by demonstrating how it is possible to obtain an organic compound such as urea from a reaction involving inorganic reagents.

• Chemical structure

In the mid-eighteenth century, Friederich Kekule realised that the chemical structure of benzene features a ring like structure consisting of six carbon atoms.

• Periodic table of the elements

Created by Dimitrij Mendeleev, after he realised in 1860 that the ranking of the hitherto discovered 63 chemical elements in rising order showed a periodic repetition in their properties.

• Electrolysis

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Humphrey Davy worked out that the passage of an electric current modifies the chemical composition of certain substances and electrolysis will separate their components.

• Electron

It is Joseph John Thomson who takes the credit for the discovery that cathode tubes emit negatively charged particles, called corpuscles or electrons.

• Electronic connections

In 1913 Niels Bohr discovered that each electron moves in an orbit around the nucleus and that the properties of an element derive mostly from the quantity of electrons present in its external orbit.

• Atoms and light

Thanks to Kirchhoff and Bunsen we know that the elements absorb/release light at certain wavelengths and each spectral band is typical of the chemical composition of the element that emits it.

• Radioactivity

The first radioactive materials were discovered and isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.

• Plastic

It was developed in 1869 thanks to Alexander Parkes and John Wesley Hyatt, whose work led to the creation of the first synthetic plastic.

These are the major discoveries in chemistry over the years: highly significant breakthroughs which have led to huge steps forward in the collective consciousness.

Translated by Joanne Beckwith