Attempts were made during the first quarter of the last century to prove that all the æriform bodies then known were simply vapours more or less remote from their point of liquefaction, and still further removed from their point of congelation. Monge and Clouet condensed sulphur dioxide some time before 1800; and Northmore, in 1805, liquefied chlorine. But these observations attracted little attention until Faraday, in 1823, independently effected the liquefaction of chlorine, and Davy that of hydrochloric acid. Faraday almost immediately afterwards liquefied sulphur dioxide, sulphuretted hydrogen, carbon dioxide, euchlorine, nitrous oxide, cyanogen, and ammonia.
Other experimenters, among whom may be mentioned Thilorier and Natterer, greatly improved the mechanical appliances for liquefying these gases; liquid carbonic acid and nitrous oxide were obtained in considerable quantities, and employed in the production of cold. Certain of the gases—hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, nitric oxide, carbonic oxide, etc.—resisted all attempts to liquefy them; and hence gaseous substances came to be classified as permanent and non-permanent, depending upon whether they could or could not be liquefied. The division was felt to be irrational even at the time it was made. There seemed no à priori reason why carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide should be liquefiable, while carbonic oxide and nitric oxide should resist all attempts to coerce them into changing their state. The real clue to the conditions required to effect the liquefaction of a gas was not discovered until nearly half a century later, when, as will be shown subsequently, the arbitrary division of gases into permanent and non-permanent was swept away.
The discovery of the law of gaseous combination by Gay Lussac, and the recognition by Ampère and Avogadro of the relation between the density of a gas or a vapour and its atomic weight, early led to improvements in the methods of determining the absolute weights of gases and vapours, especially by French chemists. Both Gay Lussac and Dumas devised processes for determining vapour densities which were in use until late in the century, and which, although now superseded by more convenient and more rapid modifications afforded valuable information concerning the molecular weights of substances and the phenomena of gaseous dissociation.
During the first decade of the nineteenth century Dalton and Henry discovered the simple law which connects pressure with the solubility of a gas in any solvent upon which it exerts no specific action. Dalton further developed the law so as to include the absorption by a solvent of the several constituents of a gaseous mixture.
Attempts were made by Schröder, Kopp, and others, to discover relations between the weights of unit volumes of liquids and solids and their chemical nature; but such attempts were only partially successful, owing to the difficulty of finding valid conditions of comparison. By comparing the specific gravities of liquids at their boiling-points Kopp succeeded in detecting a number of regularities among their specific volumes which seem to indicate that a comprehensive generalisation connecting them may yet be discovered. Kopp has also shown that regularities exist among the boiling-points of correlated substances, and that there is an interdependence between the temperature of their ebullition and the chemical characters of compounds.
This short summary will suffice to show that attempts to discover relations between the physical attributes of substances and their chemical nature were made more or less sporadically from the time that chemistry was pursued in the spirit of science. But it is only in recent times that any great accession to knowledge has resulted from such efforts. The science of physical chemistry is practically a creation of our own period. Its systematic study may be said to date only from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, since which time it has made extraordinary progress. Its broad features will be dealt with in the second volume of this work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Relating to the Period Covered by Vol. I.
Agricola, Georg. De Re Metallica.