9781422279472

Hydrogen H 1

However, at the time, these experimenters did not recognize that the gas they had produced was a separate element. They usually thought it was just another form of air. In one example of such an experiment from 1671, Robert Boyle, an English chemist, added iron to two different acids—hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sulfuric acid (H 2 SO 4 ). Both reactions gave off a gas that

easily caught on fire. Boyle referred to this gas as an “inflamma- ble solution of Mars,” where “Mars” refers to the iron and “inflam- mable” means “easy to set on fire.”

Thanks to a large inheritance, British scientist Henry Cavendish could spend all his time in a lab.

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