In today’s video article we are going to see how modern chemistry is the history of ions. What are you waiting for to know a little bit of history? Let’s get started.
Discover the history of the Ions and their chronology
Year 1833. Scientists and electrochemistry
In 1833, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, William Whewell, philosopher and historian, coined the term “scientist” to refer to the cultivators of science.
In the same year, together with Michael Faraday, one of the most influential experimentalist scientists in history, who needed a tool to describe the results of his research, and other colleagues, they created the electrochemical nomenclature
Year 1834. Terms ion, anion and cation
Faraday published an article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he systematically introduced the new electrochemical nomenclature, including the terms ion, anion and cation.
Year 1812. Opposite electric charges
Like Faraday, Humphry Davy in London and Jöns Jacobs Berzelius in Stockholm used the battery to decompose the substances composed with electric current by depositing the separated components on electric poles or electrodes.
By about 1812, Berzelius had come to identify the strength of chemical affinity with the strength of the electric current, assuming that charged atoms (or groups of atoms) are held together by the forces created by opposite electric charges.
This theory was known among specialists as the dualistic theory or, in general, as the electrochemical theory of chemical composition and decomposition.
Berzelius’ electrochemical theory gradually lost support as substances, such as hydrogen (H2), composed of equal atoms were discovered, and by the fact that (“negatively charged”) chlorine atoms could be replaced by (“positively charged”) hydrogen atoms in hydrocarbons.
Obviously, Berzelius’ theory assumed that all bonds took place between ions; what today we would call ionic (polar) bonds.
Year 1887. Molecules and Ions.
Svante Arrehnius’ proposed in 1887 that molecules in electrolytes break down into charged ions when in aqueous (dilute) solution, even if no electric current is present, contributed to the belief that ions exist and that they are involved in many physical and chemical processes.
End of the 19th century. The history of Ions, the new trend
At the end of the 19th century, ions and ionized particles became a trendy field of study as a consequence of research on the nature of cathode and anode rays, both consisting of charged particles, in the 1980s and 1990s.
X-rays and radioactivity could be detected because of their ability to produce ions and, in the case of alpha and beta decays, because they were ions.
Improved electrometers allowed the detection of small amounts of ionization, as did the detector invented in the 1920s by Hans Geiger and Walther Müller, popularly known as the “Geiger counter”.
Cosmic radiation could also be detected thanks to its electrical effects on the matter, and ionized particles could be seen thanks to the traces they left in the fog chamber invented by C.T.R. Wilson in 1899.
Twentieth century. Research is resumed
The electrochemical hypothesis that ions exist fleetingly within activated molecules gained supporters in the early years of the 20th century as electronic valence theory took its first steps with Joseph John Thomson, Walther Kossel, Gilbert N. Lewis, and Irving Langmuir.
Lewis, and later Langmuir, identified the electron as the fundamental constituent of polar (ionic) and nonpolar (covalent) valence bonds between 1916 and 1919.
In the following two decades Arthur Lapworth, Robert Robinson and, especially, Christopher Ingold revolutionized organic chemistry thanks to a new vision of reaction mechanisms in which they applied electron and ion theories to aromatic and aliphatic compounds.
In short, modern chemistry is the story of ions. Ions are much more than we think.