The History of Chemistry
Episodes
85: Great Balls of Fire
10 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A new form, or allotrope, of the element carbon was discovered in the 1980s, and we hear of the story, centering on three chemistry professors: Harry ...
84: Tunnel Vision
03 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We explore the story of a new way to "see" atoms on surfaces invented in the 1970s and 1980s, scanning probe microscopy. We hear of Gerd Bin...
83: Measure Twice, Cut Once
27 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We talk about the development of the metric system, the units chemists use in their laboratories and calculations. We start with John Wilkins and Gabr...
82: Diamond in the Rough
20 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we talk about the second successful method to make laboratory diamonds, chemical vapor deposition, invented by William Eversole of Uni...
81: Cover Story
13 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We talk of historical developments in surface chemistry of the 1960s and 1970s. With new ultra-high-vacuum chambers now available, chemists began to s...
80: I Call Your Name
06 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the origins of names in organic chemistry, starting the with chaos when Lavoisier and friends didn't create such a terminology in the ...
79: Suit Yourself
30 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Rather than talk about how chemistry changed society, this episode discusses the inverse: how society changed chemistry, and for the better. We talk m...
78: Guiding Light
23 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We learn about the development of the LED, the rival display technology to the LCD. We start with Henry Round's 1907 observations, "Losev li...
77: Moody Blues
16 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode covers the 1960s history of RCA's work on liquid crystal displays, their version of a TV screen one can hang on a wall. We begin wit...
76: The Final Frontier
09 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We hear about such chemistry-related inventions NASA was involved in during the 1960s and 1970s: Mylar blankets, lithium hydroxide to absorb carbon di...
75: Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
02 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The 1970s brought more environmental concerns: Acid rain, as described by Gene Likens, Herbert Bormann, and Noye Johnson in the USA, and Svante Odén ...
74: Laser Squad
25 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode shows the give and take between applied physics, that is, the development of the laser, and chemistry, that is, media in which laser acti...
73: Living in the Plastic Age
18 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we hear of developments in the 1970s concerning polymers such as polycarbonate, Hytrel®, PET, polyacetals, Vamac®, PEEK, fluoroelast...
72: What's in a Name?
11 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We see how naming inorganic compounds has evolved from the early 18th century to now. Initially chemists named compounds by their properties or origin...
71: Toxic Relationship
04 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We review the other three of Japan's Big Four Pollution Diseases: Minamata disease, discovered in the 1950s and understood by the late 1960s; Yok...
70: Go with the Flow
28 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We hear about the discovery of liquid crystals by Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888, through Georges Friedel's compendium in 1922 describing main types...
69: Look for the Union Label
21 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We examine the founding of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry, the organization that sets standards for names of elements and comp...
68: Transuranium Elements
15 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the discovery of elements 93 to 103, from 1940 through the early 1960s. We hear of Enrico Fermi's work, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner&apo...
67: Let's Scratch the Surface
09 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we encounter for the first time early chemistry of surfaces, including the problem of how to separate the effects of a surface versus ...
66: Plastic Dreams
03 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The 1960s continued to bring forth new polymers: Stephanie Kwolek, and Kevlar; Wilfred Sweeney and Nomex; USDA and superabsorbent polymers; ionomers; ...
65: Down to Earth
26 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We finally reach the point in our chemical history that environmental chemistry appears, with Rachel Carson, and her book, Silent Spring. We hear abou...
64: Like Groovy, Man
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we hear of Robert and Joseph Switzer, brothers who invented fluorescent paints as college students in the 1930s, and parlayed it into ...
63: We Gotta Get Out of This Place
14 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode's topic is World War II and later chemical warfare. Our first stop is with guest Dr. Mara Cohen Ioannides, to discuss Holocaust surv...
62: It is Rocket Science
09 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We talk about rocketry from ancient times up through the early 1960s, concentrating on the chemistry, that is fuels to power rockets. We talk of the i...
61: Super Trouper
31 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode discusses the controversy over the carbocation in organic chemistry in the 1950s, and experiments done to resolve the argument through th...
60: Join the Club
26 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode concerns chemical societies: their history and value. We hear of the first scientific society in Rome, the slow spread of scientific soci...
59: Don't Shoot the Messenger
20 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we talk about the mostly-forgotten OTHER nucleic acid, RNA, and the history of its discovery. Along the way we encounter Jean Brachet...
58: Smoke Signals
13 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode brings us up to almost the creation of environmental chemistry. The first part tells of the 1947 explosion of the S.S. Grandcamp in Texas...
57: The Future is Plastics
07 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is devoted to plastics invented or commercialized in the 1950s. Our first stop is carbon fibers, which started with Joseph Swan in the 19...
56: Chill Pill
01 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We hear about the age of discovery of hormones and antibiotics, from the 1930s to the 1950s. Russell Marker left Penn State to find a plant from which...
55: Fab Four
23 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We focus on the Group 4 elements: carbon (as an inorganic element), silicon, germanium--and a teeny bit about tin. We hear of the new mineral moissani...
54: Talkin' 'bout a Revolution
17 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is about the practical changes that appeared during the middle of the 20th century in chemistry laboratories. These are infrared spectrom...
53: Beads on a String
12 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode discusses the mid-20th-century discovery of the structure of proteins. We discuss Mikhail Tsvet's invention of chromatography and Fr...
52: Making It
05 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We look at the progress organic chemist Robert Woodward achieved in the 20th century in organic synthesis, that is, creating from scratch all sorts of...
51: Let's Take a Field Trip
30 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We learn about developments in 20th-century theoretical inorganic chemistry, starting with coordination complexes as explained by Christian Blomstrand...
50: This Mortal Coil
24 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As a celebratory episode, reaching number 50 in this podcast, we talk about the history of DNA, from its discovery by Dr. Friedrich Miescher in the 18...
49: Hot Lead
18 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In which we hear about 19th-century observations on the heat-capacity of gases, starting with Eunice Foot in 1856 and John Tyndall a few years later. ...
48: Food for Thought
12 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Once chemists realized that Staudinger was right, that molecules could be huge, protein research zoomed ahead. We hear of Gilbert Adair's study o...
47: Good Vibrations
06 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is devoted to "spectroscopy," when you toss light at a sample and see how the sample responds. We talk of infrared spectroscopy...
46: Polythene Pam
31 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Here we start with more polymers popularized in the 1920s through the 1940s and beyond: polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, invented by accident in 1835 by He...
45: Mechanisms
25 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Here we talk about mechanisms of organic reactions, that is, a physical model describing how particular organic molecules collide, interact, and react...
44: Teflon Don
19 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today we examine the element fluorine and some ways it affected 20th-century chemistry. The first person to isolate the element was Henri Moissan in 1...
43: Elemental Masters
13 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Here we learn about how scientists in the early 20th Century gradually became able to create isotopes, convert transmute elements from one to another,...
42: The Shape of You
07 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By the late 1920s, scientists realized that electrons cannot be precisely located around atoms. The best we can do is describe the shape of the probab...
41: By Land and by Air
01 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Before environmental chemistry, there were definitely observations about Earth's environment and the part chemistry played. We start with Joseph ...
40: Chain Gang
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we look at the rise of the Age of Plastics, with polymers from the 1920s and 1930s. We start with urea-formaldehyde resin from 1919, ...
39: This Means War
20 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We examine the first "chemical war," The Great War, or World War I, and its aftermath, and what made it so. Chlorine gas, phosgene gas, must...
38: Same but Different
13 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode introduces isotopes, first understood by Frederick Soddy, while studying decays of radioactive elements. Then we look at half-lives of el...
37: Come to the Lab
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We take a break from chemical observations and theory, and switch to practice. That is, we learn about the origins of the chemical laboratory in the R...
36: An Oily Character
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Here we talk a bit about the history of petroleum from ancient days to modernity. Among the moderns we hear of are Abraham Gesner, promoter of kerosen...
35: Au Pair
26 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We learn of the various quantum numbers that describe the size and shape of the energy levels that electrons have inside atoms. Then Louis de Broglie ...
34: Plastic Fantastic
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode introduces us to the first attempts at "plastic materials" in the 19th century, from vulcanized rubber by Charles Goodyear and ...
33: I Want a New Drug
14 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We learn about the successes in finding structures for biochemical compounds like chlorophyll, steroidal molecules and bile acids, cholesterol, vitami...
32: Shell Game
09 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Charles Barkla realized how electrons arrange themselves in shells around atoms. Gilbert Lewis noted how electrons can pair up and form bonds, without...
31: What's Inside
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ernest Rutherford discovered the basic structure of the atom. Then Max von Laue suggested diffracting x rays through crystalline layers and showed tha...
30: X ray Vision
28 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen made an earth-shattering discovery for chemistry and atoms in 1895: He discovered x rays. Then, soon after, Henri Becquerel to...
29: Electrons
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We finally reach the discovery of electrons. The path starts with experiments on electricity in small vacuum vessels and vacuum pumps, improved by Hei...
28: A Nobel, Booming Business
16 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the 19th century, the centuries-old dependence on gunpowder for war began to change with Christian Schönbein's invention of guncotton. Then S...
27: Salt of the Earth
09 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We examine industrial inorganic chemistry of the 18th and 19th centuries, including sodium carbonate, focusing on the Leblanc Process and its replacem...
26: Color Me Synthetic
04 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We look at the synthetic dye industry of the 1700s and 1800s, starting with Johann Diesbach, who invented Prussian blue in around 1706. Peter Woulfe f...
25: Seeing the Light
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we review 19th-century photochemistry, particularly photography, as well as chain reactions catalyzed by light. We finish up with boil...
24: Free Energy
23 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Josiah Gibbs revolutionized physical chemistry with his mathematics of thermodynamics and chemical equilibria, but published in an obscure journal few...
23: Ionic but not Doric nor Corinthian
17 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution explains the behavior of gases nicely, and went well with the Ideal Gas Law of Clapeyton, until van der Waals modif...
22: Hot Stuff
11 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We begin to examine 19th-century physical chemistry with thermodynamics. We hear of Rudolf Clausius and the two Laws of Thermodynamics, as well as ent...
21: The Periodic Prophet
05 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We learn about the development of spectroscopy by Bunsen and Kirchhoff, and its ramifications, like remote sensing of materials--including heavenly bo...
20: The Element of Surprise
31 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The problem of the large and growing variety of elements perplexed chemists, who attempted to bring order to the chaos. We learn about Döbereiner&apo...
19: Molecules in 3D
25 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
...in which we learn how polarized light helped Louis Pasteur to determine that internal three-dimensional structure of molecules was real based on &q...
Bonus episode: Behind the Scenes
19 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode explains how I create each episode of the podcast, from researching, to script-writing, recording, and editing.Support the show Support m...
18: Ouroboros
19 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Frankland realizes that there are specific valences for atoms. Archibald Scott Couper and August Kekulé simultaneously realize that specific a...
17: Electrochemistry
13 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We learn about Jane Marcet, one of the most popular science writers of the 1800s, and her connection to Michael Faraday, one of the most brilliant exp...
16: You're Not My Type
08 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We learn about radical theory and type theory in organic chemistry of the 2nd quarter of the 19th century, and the battle between old stalwart Berzeli...
15: It's Organic
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We reach the beginning of the branch of chemistry called Organic Chemistry. How did organic chemistry differ from inorganic chemistry? Can chemists ma...
14: Berzelius
26 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In which we discuss Jöns Jakob Berzelius and his work. We also take a short detour to hear what US Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson thought...
13: Up and Atom!
20 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
John Dalton, a Quaker from northern England, was a color-blind scientist. He presented his atomic theory that finally began to make sense to natural p...
12: Revolution’s Aftermath
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What happened to Joseph Priestley and Marie-Anne plus Antoine Lavoisier? What were the immediate effects of Lavoisier’s new chemistry? We discuss ho...
11: Love is Like Oxygen
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We continue with research by Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish, and Joseph Priestley, concerning new "airs". Then there is the work by Karl Sche...
10: Phlogiston: A Burning Question
03 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Here we see the advent of the steam engine, using the knowledge of Boyle's Law, invented by Thomas Savery. We encounter Johann Joachim Becher, wi...
9: The First Chemists—Or Chymists?
29 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In which we meet Angela Sala, who first described accurately a chemical synthesis, van Helmont and his research into gases, Torricelli and his baromet...
8: The Decline of Alchemy
24 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Age of Discovery included new science, but alchemy still lingered. We meet the scholars Agricola, Biringuccio, Paracelsus, and more, along with th...
7: European Alchemy
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As Europeans interacted more with Arab traders, many more books of ancient and Arab alchemy filtered into Europe. We learn about advances in glass, di...
6: Arab Alchemy
13 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode continues with the fall of the Roman Empire, sending the practitioners of Khemeia eastward. We learn of the rise of Arab Alchemy, the sou...
5: The Rise of Khemeia
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We talk about the rise of the mystical Egyptian art, "khemeia," in the Hellenistic Period through the Roman empire.Support the show Support ...
4: It's Elementary!
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the first chemical theories, both Chinese and Greek, from ancient times, and some of the philosophers who argued about them.Support the sho...
3: Metallica and More
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We discuss the earliest historical practical chemistry, such as bronze, smelting iron, leather-working, mummification, salt as a preservative, dyes, s...
2: All Fired Up
07 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode discusses examples of chemical change known to prehistoric humanity, from fire to fermentation, from annealing and smelting copper to gla...
Trailer to The History of Chemistry
07 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Support the show Support my podcast at https://www.patreon.com/thehistoryofchemistry Tell me how your life relates to chemistry! E-mail me at steve@h...
1: Introduction to The History of Chemistry
07 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode discusses the general theme of the podcast, its scope (from prehistory to the present), who I am, and the format of the series.Support th...