Historical development of the atom :: essays research papers fc

The notion of the atom all stared about 450 BC when a Greek scholar starting think when can something break on more, when are the pieces at their smallest, this mans name was Leucippus. Leucippus also had pupil who also thought the alike(p) way as Leucippus, his name was Democritus. They developed there ideas and when Democritus died his theory summed up briefly was that everything in the world was made of tiny pieced that could not be disquieted up any more. That how the word atom was derived from the Greek work atomos meaning unbreakable. This was the start of the theory of atoms. The first time this theory was taught at a school was by Epicurus 306 BC which he established himself.The theory laid dormant for about 2 millenniums this was basically because it was all yet forgotten, this was because it had no evidence, and it was all logic. One of the first people to show some evidence was Robert Boyle, an English chemist. In 1662 he conducted Boyles experiment and compressed air in a J tube with mercury, this opened up a whole new window.This lead to new and old thought about different types of atoms, elements. The Greeks thought simular to this but only divided it up into four groups. Their theory was close to Boyles but Boyle had a more concise idea of these elements and by the end of the 1700s they had discovered about 30 elements.In 1972 Frenchman Antoine Laurent Lavoisier discover the no mater what happens a substance always has the same weight. In the late 1700s some other Frenchman, Proust, discovert that elements can be combined to make different compounds, and that certain proportions had to be used. This became know as law of definite proportions.A few years later on an English chemist, John Dalton, a fan of Boyle worked on Prousts theory and came up with the law of multiple proportions. Dalton soon came up with weight theories of the atom a discovered that hydrogen was the lightest.In 1813 Jons Jakob Berzelius created a system using the Latin words for the element to represent that element.In 1860 the chemist of Europe had their first world(prenominal) Chemical Congress to discuss the matter. They theory that prevailed was Cannizzaro theory. John Thomson was born in 1856, and is recognised as the British scientist who discovered and identified the electron.