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.
“Nikola Tesla, in the opinion of authorities, today is conceded to be the greatest inventor of all times. Tesla has more original inventions to his credit than any other man in history. He is considered greater than Archimedes, Faraday, or Edison. His basic, as well as revolutionary discoveries for sheer audacity have no equal in the annals of the world. His master mind is easily one of the seven wonders of the intellectual world.“
–Hugo Gernsback
(“Nikola Tesla and His Inventions — An Announcement.” Electrical Experimenter, January, 1919.)
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.
It would take another two hundred years for the next big breakthrough, which came from the study of electricityandmagnetism.
The ancients had known that magnetism could be tamed; the invention of the compass by the Chinese harnessed the power of magnetism and helped launch an age of discovery. But the ancients feared the power of electricity. Lightning bolts were thought to express the anger of the gods.
The man who finally laid the foundation for this field was Michael Faraday, a poor but industrious youth who lacked any formal education. As a child, he managed to get a job working as an assistant at the Royal Institution in London. Normally, someone of his low social standing would forever sweep the floor, wash bottles, and hide in the shadows. But this young man was so tireless and inquisitive that his supervisors allowed him to perform experiments.
Faraday would go on to make some of the greatest discoveries in electricity and magnetism.
He showed that if you take a magnet and move it inside a hoop of wire, then electricity is generated in the wire.
One could also show the reverse, that a moving electric field can create a magnetic one.
This was an amazing and important observation, since the relationship between electricity and magnetism was then totally unknown.
It gradually dawned on Faraday that these two phenomena were actually two sides of the same coin. This simple observation would help to open up the electric age.
He also invented the concept of a field, one of the most important concepts in all of physics.
A field consists of these lines of force spread throughout space. Magnetic lines surround every magnet, and the magnetic field of the Earth emanates from the north pole, spreads through space, and then returns to the south pole.
Even Newton’s theory of gravity can be expressed in terms of fields, so that the Earth moves around the sun because it moves in the sun’s gravitational field.
Faraday’s discovery helped to explain the origin of the magnetic field surrounding the Earth.
Since the Earth spins, the electric charges inside the Earth also spin.
This constant motion moving inside the Earth is responsible for the magnetic field. (But this still left open a mystery: Where does the magnetic field of a bar magnet come from, since there is nothing moving or spinning in it? We will return to this mystery later.)
Today, all the known forces of the universe are expressed in the language of fields first introduced by Faraday.
The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku
