Chemistry is the study of what happens when atoms trade partners. It feeds the world through fertiliser, heals it through medicine, and explains why iron rusts and bread rises. Its laws are quantum mechanics in practice.
The people
Antoine Lavoisier
1743 – 1794 · Chemistry
Showed by careful weighing that mass is conserved in chemical reactions.
Named oxygen and hydrogen and explained combustion as combination with oxygen, ending the phlogiston theory.
Co-wrote the system of chemical names still used today. He was guillotined in the Terror in 1794.
“We may lay it down as an incontestible axiom, that, in all the operations of art and nature, nothing is created; an equal quantity of matter exists both before and after the experiment.”
Elements of Chemistry, Part I, chapter XIII (1789)From the Traité élémentaire de chimie; English translation by Robert Kerr, 1790.
John Dalton
1766 – 1844 · Chemistry, Physics
Proposed that each element is made of identical atoms with a characteristic weight, and that compounds form in fixed whole-number ratios.
Gave the first scientific description of colour blindness, which he had himself.
Dmitri Mendeleev
1834 – 1907 · Chemistry
Arranged the elements by atomic weight and chemical behaviour into the periodic table in 1869.
Left gaps for elements nobody had found and predicted their properties; gallium, scandium and germanium arrived within seventeen years and matched.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
1867 – 1934 · Chemistry, Physics
Discovered polonium and radium with Pierre Curie, and coined the word 'radioactivity'.
First person to win two Nobel Prizes, and still the only one in two different sciences: physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911.
Ran mobile X-ray units on the front lines of the First World War.
Linus Pauling
1901 – 1994 · Chemistry, Biology
Explained the chemical bond with quantum mechanics in The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1939).
Found the alpha helix in proteins and the molecular cause of sickle-cell anaemia.
Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1954) and the Nobel Peace Prize (1962), the latter for campaigning against nuclear testing.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
1910 – 1994 · Chemistry
Used X-ray crystallography to solve the structures of penicillin (1945), vitamin B12 (1954) and insulin (1969).
Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
Quotations appear only when we could check them against a named source. Sayings we could not trace are kept out.