Bill Bryson- Elemental Matters

The chapter “elemental matters” goes over the history of chemistry, and how it came into existence. it talks about the early stages, being when it was first distinguished as being different to alchemy, and about the famous (or not so famous) scientists and their discoveries. the first person talked about is Hennig Brand who discovered phosphorus in 1675. Then Scheele, with his discoveries of chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen and oxygen, and got credit for none of them. Then Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier who never discovered any elements, but took the discoveries of others and made sense of them. Then Humphry Davy, who discovered potassium, sodium, magnesium,calcium, strontium, and aluminium. It also talks about Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, who came up with the idea of the periodic table. Then it talks about Ernest Rutherford, and his works with radioactive materials.