9781422279519

A Key Meeting

These were all important

advancements scientific thoughts, but the real work on orga- nizing the elements in a meaningful way didn’t take off until 1860. In May of that year, scientists around Europe proposed the idea of the first international conference of and

Hydrogen, with one electron (red), is the simplest of the elements.

chemistry. The chemists wanted to gather to collaborate on issues such as the atomic weight of elements, chemical notation, and nomenclature standards. The meeting was held from September 3–5 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Not all of the issues were resolved, and disagreement still surrounded the concepts of atomic and molecular weight. However, one of the settled issues was that of the concept of the atomic weights. Before the meeting, there were different ways to talk about the atomic weight of an element. At the end of this meeting, the scientists were in agreement to accept a value of 1 for the atomic weight of hydrogen, an atomic weight of 12 for carbon, and of 16 for

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The Chemistry of Everyday Elements