On this day in 1834, Michael Faraday wrote about his continued failure to isolate fluorine.
(Hey, you win some, you lose some).
The element had been identified in minerals, but as fluorine is extremely reactive and forms compounds with most other elements, it had never been isolated before.
This is what happens when fluorine gas hits coal…
Faraday experienced the problem of fluorine’s reactivity 184 years ago today, when he tried using electrolysis to disassociate fluorine from a lead fluorine compound.
Humphry Davy had previously attempted to isolate fluorine using electrolysis (which had led him to successfully isolate sodium and potassium). But Davy worked with hydrofluoric acid, which is corrosive and damaged his eyes.
Davy recovered, but many other experimenters with the dream of being the first to isolate fluorine, ended up poisoning themselves, and became known as the ‘fluorine martyrs’.
After 74 years and many chemists’ trial and error, elemental fluorine was eventually isolated via electrolysis by Henri Moissan in 1886, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906.
