Iron is a very useful element and is well used today. A lot of our modern day conveniences come because of its uses. It has become a backbone for many structures that we construct. It is also a basic material for many of the innovations we now enjoy. We use iron to make steel and other alloys to answer various needs of our every day lives. Because of the many uses of this interesting element, some have wondered just who discovered iron.

Metals of Antiquity

It is not possible for anyone to say who it was or which people exactly where the first to use this element. We just can’t tell who discovered iron since it has been used by many people even from ancient times. Iron is classified along with other seven metals that are dubbed as The Metals of Antiquity. These include gold, copper, silver, lead, tin, iron, and mercury. All these metals were already known to the ancient peoples of Greece, Egypt, Rome, and Mesopotamia.

Early History

It is known that nobody was able to make use of iron before 1500 BC due to the fact that it was really hard to make. It is further known that iron was put to use in Asia. Thus we know that those who discovered iron were from that part of the world. Hittites from West Asia were a particular people who learned how to use this element. Since they found out that iron weapons were far better to use than the bronze ones they used they made iron smelting and forging a secret.

They were able to keep it all a secret until 1100 BC when the Hittite Empire fell apart. When it did the secret of making iron got out to other people. Though the Hittites were the first to make weapons out of it, we may not surely say that they were the ones who discovered iron.

Other Nations

Other than the Hittites, there were other nations that learned how to use iron. The Jews, Philistines, Kushites, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, and Carthaginians all learned how to make and use iron. From 1000 BC unto our present day iron has become the most used metal in the world.

In 800 BC the Aryans invaded the land of India and brought their knowledge of making iron with them. The Chinese only learned how to use it from 700 to 600 BC. Each culture that has learned how to use iron had their own ideas for its different uses. However, we can’t really tell who discovered iron.

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Gold is a chemical element, the most ductile and malleable of all pure metals in the world. It is found in grains or nuggets in rocks and other natural formations. Gold has a bright yellow color. The hue varies from one type of gold to another, as does its value. Arabian gold and Bangkok gold may be considered superior to Italian or Chinese gold.

Nothing on earth is more fascinating and desirable to humans than gold. Because gold occurs in an uncompounded form, it was probably the first metal ever discovered and used by man.

Discovery and Early Use of Gold

Gold occurs in various parts of the world. No single person discovered gold but there are many traces of its use by ancient peoples. One early reference to it was made by Tushratta, a king of Mitanni (now northern Syria) in 2600 BC. He remarked that there was more gold than dust in Egypt. Such abundance of gold especially in Nubia made Egypt a rich country. By 1500 BC the metal was being used as a means of exchange in international trade. Later in 1200 BC the Egyptians figured out how to beat gold into leaf and mix it with other metals to form alloys.

The Greeks were keener on gold’s monetary value than anything else. By 500 BC, this had led them seek out gold mines everywhere in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. In war, gold was among the most precious of the loot as when Alexander conquered Persia. Noblemen were buried with golden funeral masks, such as the Mask of Agamemnon recovered by archeologists.

The Romans also sought gold as they needed it to fund their military expeditions. One man took his greed too far. A member of the First Triumvirate, Crassus, invaded the Parthian Empire for his lust for gold. The Parthians defeated him at war and then gave him what he wanted – by pouring molten gold down his throat.

Symbolism of Gold

Gold has long been a symbol for divinity and royalty. Just as silver was associated with the moon, so gold was connected with the sun. If the sun was the king of the heavens, gold was the noblest of all metals on earth. In Greek mythology, gold was sacred to Apollo, the sun god. In alchemy and astrology, the glyph of the sun was circle with a dot in the center. The same was used to symbolize gold. Alchemists believed they could discover gold from lead through special operations. Others said gold symbolized the perfection of the human being.

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Known as an odorless, colorless and nonmetallic flammable gas, hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. This element is important to the formation of stars belonging in the main sequence. However, the gas is very rare in our planet. The chemical element has various industrial uses. Moreover, the element is important to the discovery of the atomic structure. To learn more about this element, it is best if we start with the history of the discovery of hydrogen.

Historical Background

Who discovered hydrogen? Henry Cavendish discovered the element in 1776. He found out that various elements including hydrogen composed water. Cavendish also discovered the gas from a certain metal-acid experiment that he performed. Antoine Lavoisier named the gas hydrogen in 1783 when he and Pierre-Simon Laplace proved the findings of Cavendish that water could be produced when the gas is burned. The element was first liquefied in 1898 by James Dewar. He did this with the use of a vacuum flask and the regenerative cooling technique Dewar invented. Dewar developed solid hydrogen in 1899.

Additional Information and Other Important Details

This flammable gas is very important to the operations of chemical industries as well as petroleum industries. This gas is needed for upgrading or improving the state of fossil fuels. Aside from this, it is also necessary for the development of ammonia. One of the isotopes of the element is important to some of the operations in petrochemical plants like hydrodesulfurization, hydrodealkylation and hydrocracking.

Aside from the uses of the element in petroleum industries, it is also useful in food processing industries. The element is important to enhance the saturation level of oils and unsaturated fats that are commonly used in margarines. In other industries, hydrogen is essential manufacture methanol as well as hydrochloric acid. Moreover, the gas is needed for processing metallic ores.

In engineering and physics, hydrogen is widely used in atomic hydrogen welding. In addition to this, the element is used in conducting cryogenic studies as well as superconductivity research. It is also important to manufacture airships and balloons.

After learning the various uses of the element, it is necessary to know the hazards associated with the use of hydrogen. It is important to use the gas in a well-ventilated building because it is highly flammable. It is also beneficial to install hydrogen sensors in the place where the element is stored. Aside from the sensors, it is also best to use UV/IR flame detectors.

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Represented by the atomic number 6 and the symbol C, carbon is an important chemical element classified as tetravalent and nonmetallic. It is one of the longest existing elements known today. The most popular allotropes of carbon are amorphous carbon, diamond and graphite. It is widely used in the petrochemical industry, specifically in producing kerosene as well as gasoline. In addition to these interesting details, it is good to learn other valuable information about this all-important element such as who discovered carbon.

The Discovery of Carbon

Who discovered carbon? Although this element was discovered in prehistory, several individuals contributed to a clearer knowledge about its different properties and characteristics. For instance, French scientist Rene A. F. de Reaumur first showed in 1722 that through the absorption of carbon, it was possible to transform iron into steel. By 1772, the father of modern chemistry Antoine Lavoisier discovered that diamonds were in a way one form of carbon. In the textbook that he published in 1789, he classified it as an element.

Additional Facts and Other Interesting Details

People can easily find inorganic carbon in carbon dioxide, dolomites and limestone. Likewise, it is also possible to find this element in methane clathrates, oil, peat and coal. Looking into the Earth’s crust, it is one of the less abundant. In terms of mass, it is the fourth most abundant in the entire universe after oxygen, helium and hydrogen. After oxygen, carbon is the second most abundant in the human body at the rate of 18.5 percent.

Carbon is a highly essential element especially to living systems. It has a number of economic uses including wood and food. Likewise, it is widely used in hydrocarbon forms such as petroleum or crude oil and fossil fuel methane gas. In addition, there are also valuable carbon animal polymers available such as silk, cashmere and wool. Furthermore, it is part of neutron moderators for making nuclear reactors, added to electrodes for producing dry batteries and used as molding material in glass production.

In 1985, the molecule called fullerene was discovered. It was a new allotrope of the element. It comes in nanostructured forms like nanotubes and buckyballs. When mixed with nitrogen and oxygen atoms, synthetic carbon polymers can be transformed into plastics. Moreover, it can also be used to form alloys when combined with iron, such as the case of carbon steel. It also plays major roles in electroforming and electroplating. Extreme caution is necessary when handling carbon because some compounds contain lethal poisons. These include carbon monoxide, cyanide as well as tetrodotoxin.

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There is no arguing that oxygen is the most important element for all of mankind. Our very life is dependent on it as is numerous other organisms that live on our planet. Our dependence on it is one of the things that limit us from exploring our universe since oxygen is not abundant outside of the Earth.

Knowing this dire connection that human kind has to oxygen, it is surprising that only in the eighteenth century did man actually ‘discover’ oxygen. The use of the word discovered must be put into context of course since the discovery of oxygen is unlike other discoveries, such as that of the Americas or that of Australia. This is because man has always intuited through analysis the existence of oxygen; it’s just that no one was able to isolate it from air until the eighteenth century.

The credit for being the men who discovered oxygen goes to three scientists of that century; three scientists who each claimed the achievement for themselves. Their squabble notwithstanding, each of the three scientists are all worthy of the credit since each one of them pioneered the exploration of the element most important to mankind.

First of the men who discovered oxygen was Carl Wilhelm Scheele, a Swede who, in 1772, isolated oxygen by burning nitrates and mercuric oxides together. Knowing oxygen is a combustible gas, he dubbed the new-found element as ‘fire-air’. Two years later, one of the three men who discovered oxygen, Joseph Priestley achieved the same feat by exposing mercuric oxide to the sun. He described the isolated air as one that makes fire burn brighter and a rodent much livelier. A year later, he published these findings in his books concerning properties of air. The last of the three men who discovered oxygen was Antoine Lavoisier who claimed that he discovered oxygen independently through his own experiments.

If being the sole discoverer meant basing solely on the years on which the each of three men discovered oxygen, Scheele would have been the unequivocal discoverer of oxygen. But since being the first academic publisher concerning oxygen counts a lot, Priestley has always been regarded as the one who discovered oxygen. Scheele and Lavoisier come in second, for their pioneering studies on the elements properties that led to further knowledge concerning oxygen.

Oxygen is the most important thing in the universe for us humans and it is only befitting that we be aware of the men who discovered oxygen labored to understand deeply the very element that we breathe in and breathe out every moment of our life.

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