The Historical Background of Chemistry

Early practical chemistry. Scientific ideas of the ancient world. Greek science. Hellenistic culture and the rise of alchemy. Chinese alchemy. Arabic alchemy. The transmission of chemistry to the west. The fourteenth and fifteeth century, a periodic of technical chemistry. Chemical practice and theory in the first half of the seventeenth century. The spread of atomistic theories. Theories of the eighteenth century: phlogiston and affinity. Laboratory discoveries of the eighteenth century: the chemistry of gases. Lavoisier and the foundation of modern chemistry. The laws of atomic combination. Electrochemistry and chemical affinity. The development of organic chemistry: the radical and unitary theories. Organic chemistry from the theory of types to the structural theory. The systematization of inorganic chemistry. Physical chemistry in the nineteenth century. The development of chemistry as a profession during the nineteenth century. Radioactivity and atomic structure.