People
The experiments and chemical pages name the people who discovered or popularised the chemistry. Each entry below has a stable anchor, so pages link straight to it — and where a name first appears in the text it carries a footnote with this one-line summary. Listed alphabetically by surname.
Anna Atkins
English botanist and photographer (1799–1871). In 1843 she produced Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions — the first book illustrated with photographs — by laying dried algae on cyanotype-coated paper and printing them in sunlight.
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Joseph Black
Scottish physician and chemist (1728–1799). By heating chalk he discovered “fixed air” — carbon dioxide — showing it to be a distinct gas, the reaction behind the citric acid volcano and the limewater test.
Robert Bunsen
German chemist (1811–1899). With Gustav Kirchhoff he invented flame spectroscopy in 1859, discovering caesium and rubidium by their flame colours — the science behind flame tests. The Bunsen burner is named for him.
Henry Bollmann Condy
English industrial chemist (1826–1907). He marketed “Condy’s fluid,” a potassium permanganate disinfectant and deodoriser, from the 1850s.
William Cruickshank
British military chemist (c. 1745–1810). He built the first battery suited to mass production (the trough battery, 1802) and used it to electrodeposit copper — the beginnings of electroplating.
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John Frederic Daniell
British chemist and meteorologist (1790–1845). His 1836 Daniell cell, built around copper sulfate, gave the first steady and reliable source of electric current.
Humphry Davy
British chemist (1778–1829). Using the newly invented battery he isolated sodium, potassium, calcium, and other elements by electrolysis (1807–08), first obtaining metallic sodium from molten lye.
Michael Faraday
English scientist (1791–1867). Davy’s assistant and successor, he formulated the laws of electrolysis and laid the foundations of electromagnetism.
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Hermann von Fehling
German chemist (1811–1885). He devised Fehling’s solution, a copper-based test for reducing sugars, close kin to the silver mirror reaction.
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Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
French chemist and physicist (1778–1850). He established gas laws and studied the behaviour of supersaturated1 solutions like those in hot ice.
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Johann Rudolf Glauber
German-Dutch chemist and apothecary (1604–1670). He first prepared sodium sulfate (“Glauber’s salt”) and potassium permanganate, and pioneered the production of mineral acids.
John Herschel
English astronomer, mathematician, and chemist (1792–1871). He invented the cyanotype in 1842 and coined the words “photography,” “negative,” and “positive.”
Gustav Kirchhoff
German physicist (1824–1887). He co-founded spectroscopy with Bunsen and formulated fundamental laws of electrical circuits and thermal radiation.
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Antoine Lavoisier
French chemist (1743–1794), often called the father of modern chemistry. He named oxygen and hydrogen, established the conservation of mass, and overturned the phlogiston theory.
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Nicolas Leblanc
French chemist (1742–1806). In 1791 he invented the first industrial process for making soda ash (sodium carbonate) from common salt.
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Justus von Liebig
German chemist (1803–1873), a founder of organic and agricultural chemistry. He devised the practical silvering process behind the silver mirror.
Louis-Camille Maillard
French physician and chemist (1878–1936). He described the browning reaction between sugars and amino acids that flavours cooked food — see food browning.
Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet
French botanist (1838–1902). He created Bordeaux mixture, a copper sulfate–lime fungicide, in the 1880s, which saved Europe’s vineyards from downy mildew.
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Isaac Newton
English physicist and mathematician (1643–1727). His study of thin-film interference (“Newton’s rings”) explains the interference colours of titanium anodizing.
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Steve Papell
American NASA engineer. In 1963 he invented ferrofluid as a way to draw rocket fuel toward a pump in weightlessness using a magnetic field.
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Louis Pasteur
French chemist and microbiologist (1822–1895). In 1848 he discovered molecular chirality by hand-sorting the left- and right-handed tartrate crystals of Rochelle salt.
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Joseph Priestley
English chemist and clergyman (1733–1804). He isolated oxygen and several other gases and invented carbonated water.
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Ronald Rosensweig
American engineer (1930–2019), a pioneer of ferrohydrodynamics. The spiking instability of ferrofluids is named after him.
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Carl Wilhelm Scheele
Swedish-German apothecary (1742–1786). A prolific discoverer — of oxygen, chlorine, and many acids — much of whose work was credited to others.
Pierre Seignette
Apothecary of La Rochelle (1632–1698). He first prepared Rochelle salt — long known as Seignette salt — as a medicine.
Ernest Solvay
Belgian industrial chemist (1838–1922). His ammonia-soda process made cheap sodium carbonate and displaced the older Leblanc process.
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Bernhard Tollens
German chemist (1841–1918). His ammoniacal silver reagent (Tollens’ reagent) gives the silver mirror test for aldehydes.
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Alessandro Volta
Italian physicist (1745–1827). He invented the voltaic pile — the first battery — in 1800, launching the science of electrochemistry. The volt is named for him.
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Footnotes
Supersaturation — A solution holding more dissolved substance than it normally could — an unstable state that crystallizes when disturbed.↩︎