9781422279489

Oxygen: CHAPTER 1

Discovery and History

W hile elements like gold, silver, copper, lead, and mercury had been known to man since antiq- uity, the first formal scientific discovery of an element did not occur until 1669, when Hennig Brand, a German alchemist , isolated and identified phospho- rus during a process that required boiling 1,500 gallons of hu- man urine that he had somehow stockpiled. (He had originally set out to discover the philosopher’s stone, a legendary object that was said to be capable of turning base metals into gold.) Oxygen also had to be “discovered.” Well before it was iso- lated and identified, the idea of oxygen intrigued the scientific community. In the late 1500s, the famed Italian artist and sci- entist Leonardo da Vinci hypothesized that because air is not

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