1)History naming formulae
(lots of different people) People get inspired by one another.
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
The son of a wealthy Parisian lawyer, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes. His real interest, however, was in science, which he pursued with passion while leading a full public life. On the basis of his earliest scientific work, mostly in geology, he was elected in 1768—at the early age of 25—to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society. In the same year he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a profit-and-loss basis. A few years later he married the daughter of another tax farmer, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, who was not quite 14 at the time. Madame Lavoisier prepared herself to be her husband’s scientific collaborator by learning English to translate the work of British chemists like
Joseph Priestley and by studying art and engraving to illustrate Antoine-Laurent’s scientific experiments.
In 1775 Lavoisier was appointed a commissioner of the Royal Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration and took up residence in the Paris Arsenal. There he equipped a fine laboratory, which attracted young chemists from all over Europe to learn about the “Chemical Revolution” then in progress. He meanwhile succeeded in producing more and better gunpowder by increasing the supply and ensuring the purity of the constituents—saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal—as well as by improving the methods of granulating the powder.
Characteristic of Lavoisier’s chemistry was his systematic determination of the weights of reagents and products involved in chemical reactions, including the gaseous components, and his underlying belief that matter—identified by weight—would be conserved through any reaction (the law of conservation of mass). Among his contributions to chemistry associated with this method were the understanding of combustion and respiration as caused by chemical reactions with the part of the air (as discovered by Priestley) that he named “oxygen,” and his definitive proof by composition and decomposition that water is made up of oxygen and hydrogen. His giving new names to substances—most of which are still used today—was an important means of forwarding the Chemical Revolution, because these terms expressed the theory behind them. In the case of
oxygen, from the Greek meaning “acid-former,” Lavoisier expressed his theory that oxygen was the acidifying principle. He considered 33 substances as
elements—by his definition, substances that chemical analyses had failed to break down into simpler entities. Ironically, considering his opposition to phlogiston (see
Priestley), among these substances was
caloric, the unweighable substance of heat, and possibly light, that caused other substances to expand when it was added to them. To propagate his ideas, in 1789 he published a textbook,
Traité Élémentaire de chimie, and began a journal,
Annales de Chimie, which carried research reports about the new chemistry almost exclusively.
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), best remembered for his discovery of the gas that would later be named "oxygen," was ceremoniously welcomed to the United States in 1794 as a leading contemporary thinker and friend of the new republic. Then 61, this Englishman was known to Americans at least as well for his prodigious political and theological writings as for his scientific contributions.
Priestley was educated to be a minister in the churches that dissented from the Church of England, and he spent most of his life employed as a preacher or teacher. He gradually came to question the divinity of Jesus, while accepting much else of Christianity—in the process becoming an early Unitarian.
Priestley was a supporter of both the American and French Revolutions. He saw the latter as the beginning of the destruction of all earthly regimes that would precede the Kingdom of God, as foretold in the Bible. These freely expressed views were considered seditious by English authorities and many citizens. In 1791 a mob destroyed his house and laboratory in Birmingham. This episode and subsequent troubles made him decide to emigrate to the United States. With his sons he planned to set up a model community on undeveloped land in Pennsylvania, but like many such dreams, this one did not materialize. He and his wife did, however, build a beautiful home equipped with a laboratory far up the Susquehanna River in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.
Priestley’s first scientific work, The History of Electricity (1767), was encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London. In preparing the publication Priestley began to perform experiments, at first merely to reproduce those reported in the literature but later to answer questions of his own. In the 1770s he began his most famous scientific research on the nature and properties of gases. At that time he was living next to a brewery, which provided him an ample supply of carbon dioxide. His first chemical publication was a description of how to carbonate water, in imitation of some naturally occurring bubbly mineral waters. Inspired by Stephen Hales’s Vegetable Staticks (first edition, 1727), which described the pneumatic trough for gathering gases over water, Priestley began examining all the “airs” that might be released from different substances. Many, following Aristotle’s teachings, still believed there was only one “air.” By clever design of apparatus and careful manipulation, Priestley isolated and characterized eight gases, including oxygen—a record not equaled before or since. In addition, he contributed to the understanding of photosynthesis and respiration.
Priestley fought a long-running battle with
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his followers over how to interpret the results of experiments with gases. Priestley interpreted them in terms of phlogiston—the hypothetical principle of flammability that was thought to give metals their luster and ductility and was widely used in the early 18th century to explain combustion, calcination, smelting, respiration, and other chemical processes. Proponents of phlogiston did not consider it to be a material substance, so it was therefore unweighable. Priestley gave qualitative explanations of these phenomena, talking, for example, about oxygen as “dephlogisticated air.”
Alfred Nobel
n the 18th and early 19th centuries, the growing understanding of gases and the reactions that produce them was of great importance to modern industrial society. Not least was the production of explosives—substances that undergo reactions involving the release of heat and rapidly expanding gaseous products. In making black powder Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and E. I. du Pont were improving a technology known to Western cultures since the 14th century and even earlier in China and the Far East. By the mid-19th century much more powerful explosives were being created by treating various organic substances with nitric acid. Among these new explosives was dynamite, a stabilized form of nitroglycerin, invented in 1867 by Alfred Nobel (1833–1896). One thousand times more powerful than black powder, it expedited the building of roads, tunnels, canals, and other construction projects worldwide. Nobel died in 1896, leaving his considerable estate as an endowment for annual awards in chemistry, physics, medicine or physiology, literature, and peace—all of which represented his lifelong interests.
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was born at Lismore Castle, Munster, Ireland, the 14th child of the Earl of Cork. As a young man of means, he was tutored at home and on the Continent. He spent the later years of the English Civil Wars at Oxford, reading and experimenting with his assistants and colleagues. This group was committed to the New Philosophy, which valued observation and experiment at least as much as logical thinking in formulating accurate scientific understanding. At the time of the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, Boyle played a key role in founding the Royal Society to nurture this new view of science.
Although Boyle’s chief scientific interest was chemistry, his first published scientific work, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects (1660), concerned the physical nature of air, as displayed in a brilliant series of experiments in which he used an air pump to create a vacuum. The second edition of this work, published in 1662, delineated the quantitative relationship that Boyle derived from experimental values, later known as “Boyle’s law”: that the volume of a gas varies inversely with pressure.
Robert Boyle at the age of 37, with his air pump in the background. François Diodati reengraved this image from an engraving by William Fairthorne, Opera varia (1680). Courtesy Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library.
Boyle was an advocate of corpuscularism, a form of atomism that was slowly displacing Aristotelian and Paracelsian views of the world. Instead of defining physical reality and analyzing change in terms of Aristotelian substance and form and the classical four elements of earth, air, fire, and water—or the three Paracelsian elements of salt, sulfur, and mercury—corpuscularism discussed reality and change in terms of particles and their motion. Boyle believed that chemical experiments could demonstrate the truth of the corpuscularian philosophy. In this context he defined elements inSceptical Chymist (1661) as "certain primitive and simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies; which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those called perfectly mixt bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved."
Chemistry you might have come across names like "spirit of salt" (hydrochloric acid) or, since the early chemists were German, names like äpfelsäuer (malic acid). Cool sounding names, but not used any more. That tradition evolved out of the alchemy tradition where you described things on the basis of where they came from (along with a lot of obsfucation because you didn't want anyone else to know your secrets). "Spirit of salt" was made by mixing sulphuric acid ("spirit of vitriol", where "vitriol" is the glassy metal sulphate) and salt. Malic acid is what makes the apple taste sour, and is the source of the taste of many a hard candy. Formic acid was so named because the carboxylic acid was originally distilled from ants
Berzeluis, one of the so-called fathers of chemistry, back in the early 1800s. He said that chemicals should be named by what they are, not by where they came from. (After all, you can find malic acid elsewhere, like in cherries.) He created the system of 1-letter and 2-letter atomic symbols taught today in secondary school, with the letters taken from the Latin words for the element (hence "Pb" for plumbum; lead).
This is Berzeluis
B)What is the concept behind the naming?
Their Discovery and the Origins of their Names
The history behind naming those chemical is based on different element's individuals. Like for Nitrogen which is N was derived from Niter (Greek) for saltpeter, combined with -gen (Greek), meaning producing.
And for Oxygen , it was first called "Fire air" by Scheele when he discovered it because it supported combustion, but he explained oxygen using phlogistical terms because he did not believe that his discovery disproved the phlogiston theory. Before Scheele made his discovery of oxygen, he studied air. Air was thought to be an element that made up the environment in which chemical reactions took place but did not interfere with the reactions. But Joseph Priesley published his findings first.
This is Joseph.
3)Does ate represent 3 Oxygen atoms?
Answer:NO!
They contain oxygen
The difference between ate and ite is that the ones with ite contain 1 less oxygen than the same one with ate.
For example nitrate is NO3 but nitrite is NO2
Sources:
http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/oxygenexperiments.html
http://web.me.com/dtrapp/Elements/color.html
