The History of Chemistry – From Ancient Times To The Modern View of Atoms and the Periodic Table

As you watch the slide show outlining the key leaps in understanding that resulted in our correct model for atoms, write down the key idea for each of the leaps. Aim for a few concise words to describe the slide.

Leap Key Person/Time Period Key Idea1: Fire Ancient civilisations: 5000BC to 400BC2: Looking more closely Greek and Roman civilisations: 400BC

to 400ADThe Big Gap 400AD to 1700AD No significant new discoveries were made3: Connection between rocks and air

John Black: 1748

4: Discovering oxygen Joseph Priestley: 17765: Combusting gases Antoine Lavoisier: 17796:Classifying elements John Dalton: 18007: Using electricity Sir Humphry Davy: 18068: There’s nothing special about living things

Friedrich Woehler: 1828

9: Chemicals and heat energy are connected

Julius Robert von Mayer: 1840

10: Putting things in order Mendeleyev: 187111: Thermodynamics James Joule: 184712: Vacuum tubes J. J. Thomson: 189413: X-rays Wilhem Roentgen: 189514: Radioactivity Henri Becquerel: 189615: Determining the size of atoms

Albert Einstein: 1906

16: Firing alpha rays at atoms

Ernest Rutherford: 1912

17: Producing electricity from light

Albert Einstein, Max Planck: 1926

18: What if everything behaved like light

Niels Bohr: 1913, Werner Heisenberg: 1927, Erwin Schroedinger: 1927, Paul Dirac: 1927, Louis de Broglie: 1929, Wolfgang Pauli: 1930

19: The missing mass James Chadwick: 193220: The modern explanation

Many theoretical physicists and chemists

Questions to think about

1. Why do you think there was this gap in progress lasting around 1300 years? __________________________________________

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2. It is interesting that there were several consecutive years in which substantial progress was made. These were clustered in two distinct groups – see if you can find them by looking at the time line: __________________________________________________

3. The timeline cannot mention every scientist that made a contribution. Here is a list of some scientists that made a great contribution, but for reasons of space didn’t make it into your timeline above.

John Dalton, Jons Berzelius, Henry Cavendish, James Watt, Lord Kelvin, Thomas Faraday, James Clark Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, Sadi Carnot, Thomas Young, Marie Curie

If you have time, you might like to find out about the contribution of one or more of these scientists.