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Jöns Jacob Berzelius was a Swedish chemist who lived from 1779 to 1848 and made fundamental contributions to understanding the composition and properties of chemical substances. His work helped establish modern chemistry by developing precise methods for analyzing what elements make up different materials and discovering several new chemical elements.
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Quotes
- “Every chemical combination is wholly and solely dependent on two opposing forces, positive and negative electricity, and every chemical compound must be composed of two parts combined by the agency of their electrochemical reaction, since there is no third force. Hence it follows that every compound body, whatever the number of its constituents, can be divided into two parts, one of which is positively and the other negatively electrical.”
- “A tidy laboratory means a lazy chemist.”
- “As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen, to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive ingredient.”
- “In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry.”
- “The devil may write textbooks of chemistry, for every few years the whole thing changes.”
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Article
Baron Jöns Jacob Berzelius ( Swedish: [jœ̌ns ˈjɑ̂ːkɔb bæˈʂěːlɪɵs]; 20 August 1779 – 7 August 1848) was a Swedish chemist. Berzelius is considered, along with Robert Boyle, John Dalton, and Antoine Lavoisier, to be one of the founders of modern chemistry. Berzelius became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1808 and served from 1818 as its principal functionary. He is known in Sweden as the "Father of Swedish Chemistry". During his lifetime he did not customarily use his first given name, and was universally known simply as Jacob Berzelius.
Although Berzelius began his career as a physician, his enduring contributions were in the fields of electrochemistry, chemical bonding and stoichiometry. In particular, he is noted for his determination of atomic weights and his experiments that led to a more complete understanding of the principles of stoichiometry, which is the branch of chemistry pertaining to the quantitative relationships between elements in chemical compounds and chemical reactions and that these occur in definite proportions. This understanding came to be known as the "Law of Constant Proportions".
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1779 births1848 deaths19th-century Swedish chemists19th-century Swedish scientistsAcademic staff of the Karolinska InstituteCeriumDiscoverers of chemical elementsFellows of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesForeign members of the Royal SocietyHonorary Fellows of the Royal Society of EdinburghManchester Literary and Philosophical Society