How Was Hydrogen Gas Discovered? What kind of effects has it had on our lives?

Water is a compound made up of which elements?

What's not to know about this? H2O, two hydrogen atoms entered into a chemical reaction with one oxygen atom and water was formed.

Okay, one more question for you.

What do you get if you boil water? For example, do hydrogen and oxygen gases form from boiling water?

I don't know exactly, but as far as I know, boiling water turns into steam, and then when it cools down, it turns into liquid water as we know it again.

No, I don't think so. Only water vapor is formed from boiling water. Electrolysis is necessary to obtain oxygen and hydrogen.

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One more question, there is hydrogen gas in the air, right?

Of course! It's very little, but it should be there.

As far as I know, the majority of the air is nitrogen gas, 78%, then there is oxygen, 21%, and the remaining 1%-1.5% is water vapor and other gases, argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, Of course, krypton and hydrogen are included in this list. In the upper parts of the atmosphere, there is also a gas (O3) consisting of three oxygen atoms, which we call ozone.

Okay, look, I'm going to ask one last question in a moment, and this question will be a thought-provoking question.

Henry Cavendish discovered the element hydrogen in 1766.

At this date, electricity had not yet been discovered, but Benjamin Franklin is recorded as the person who discovered electricity.

Indeed, Benjamin Franklin discovered the connection between lightning and electricity in 1752.

Static electricity has been known since ancient times. Its history dates back to Thales of Miletus, around 600 BC.

Lightning is something that people have observed throughout human history.

However, electricity as we know it came into use much later.

You know that electricity was made available to the masses with Tesla and Edison.

Before him, the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta was the first to produce electricity in the 1800s.

That's why one of the units of measurement we use today for electricity is the volt.

The scientist who conducted serious studies on electricity is Michail Faraday. In 1831, Faraday discovered the first dynamo. There are many more things he did, but this is enough for now in terms of chronological order.

Then, in 1878, Edison invented the light bulb and Nikola Tesla produced alternative electrical energy.

If we count the French physicist Andre-Marie Ampere, George Simon Ohm and other valuable scientists who occasionally worked on electricity, we can say that electricity came into use quite later.

At least we should say that it happened much later than the discovery of hydrogen gas.

In other words, it was not yet possible to produce hydrogen from water by electrolysis in 1766, when hydrogen was discovered.

Then comes the thought-provoking question.

There is not such an abundance of hydrogen in the air, and it was not possible to separate it from water by electrolysis at that time...

So how did Henry Cavendish discover the element hydrogen in 1766?

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Henry Cavendish is an English chemist. He lived between 1731-1810.

However, although he went to Peterhouse College, affiliated with Cambridge University, between 1749 and 1753, he could not graduate there, and then he established a laboratory and worked on his own in his laboratory for nearly 50 years. During this period, he did not even feel the need to publish a proper scientific publication about his work, and lived an introverted life, doing various experiments in his laboratory most of his time.

His scientific publications during this period are only about 20.

Through the experiments he carried out in a wide variety of fields, he made discoveries on subjects such as the composition of air, the nature and properties of hydrogen, the specific heat of some objects, the composition of water and various properties of electricity. He was even able to measure the mass and density of the Earth quite accurately with an experimental method he developed.

Those who are curious about this experiment can find the details of the experiment online if they search for it as the Cavendish experiment. He conducted an experiment on gravity with lead spheres and calculated the mass of the Earth using Isaac Newton's gravitational formulas, reaching very accurate results.

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Yes, Henry Cavendish discovered hydrogen gas, as you might guess, by adding metal zinc pieces into acids.

Although it was known before him that acids produced gases from some metals. However, Henry Cavendish was the first person to discover the properties of the resulting gas and that it was a lighter and more flammable gas than air.

Irish physicist Robert Boyle, who lived between 1627 and 1691, also became aware of hydrogen gas while working on gases, but he did not pay much attention to this gas. He also understands that a gas comes out of acids thanks to some metals.

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When I was a kid, I made flying balloons at home using zinc pieces I put in acid. Although I had splashed acid on our cast iron stove, which had a beautiful enamel coating, and I had gotten a good beating from my mother because of the trace the acid left on the coating, but I loved dealing with such things. As a result, I managed to fill the balloons with hydrogen and fly them.

Where did I find the acid?

There was both hydrochloric acid and sometimes sulfuric acid, that is, vitriol in the house. Chlorinated acid wouldn't be as foul-smelling as vitriol, but it was a strong acid, too. My mother used to clean the stony places and toilets with viscosity or chlorinated acid.

In the past, acid was widely used in homes. At that time, there were not all kinds of chemical cleaners like there are now. Vitriol! Panacea!

In any case, bathrooms and toilets would not be tiled as they are today. We call it mosaic, there were small white pebbles between the cement, and the stairs and so on were always made of mosaic. Bathrooms and toilets too.

So, vitriol is the perfect cleaning chemical for mosaics.

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Henry Cavendish himself called this gas "flammable air" at the time.

From his experiments on air, he realized that the air must contain other gases besides nitrogen and oxygen, but the other gases in the air were not detected until a hundred years later.

He is the one who discovered that living things breathe air and release carbon dioxide.

He also had experiments on electricity, and Michael Faraday would later benefit from his work.

He was the first to say that the force between two electrically charged objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Later, Charles Augustin de Coulomb would formulate this theory and present this fundamental law of electrostatics, which we call Coulomb's law today.

In short, Henry Cavendish is remembered as one of the greatest scientists of his time.

In fact, the most important result he found on chemistry is that water is not an element. So, in the beginning, water was thought of as a single element.

He somehow discovered from his experiments on this light and flammable gas that water was formed from the synthesis of oxygen and hydrogen, that is, oxygen and "flammable air", as he called hydrogen gas.

Because burning hydrogen creates water vapor.

From this, Henry Cavendish understands that there is hydrogen in water.

Moreover, through his measurements, he discovered that water consists of one unit of oxygen and two units of hydrogen, that is, he proved that water is H2O with the chemical formula we know today. Of course, oxygen gas had not yet been fully synthesized at that time, it is really interesting how he came to this conclusion.

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Yes, the separation of oxygen and hydrogen in water will be achieved in the following years.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier is a French chemist.

He lived between 1743 and 1794, and although he passed away at a young age, at the age of 51, he witnessed two revolutions in his short life (one was the French revolution, the other was the revolution in the world of science, the revolution from alchemy to chemistry) and made very important discoveries on chemistry.

His most important discovery was that he revealed the role of oxygen in chemical reactions, which we call oxidation today.

In 1778, he synthesized oxygen gas in pure form and named this gas oxygen.

Lavoisier is the person who named hydrogen gas hydrogen in 1783.

Henry Cavendish conducted many experiments on hydrogen gas and discovered the gas and many of its properties.

However, he calls this gas "flammable air".

Based on Henry Cavendish's view that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen, Lavoisier officially proved that there is hydrogen in water with an experiment called "Lavoisier's gun barrel experiment".

And then he decides that the name "hydrogen", which is a combination of the Latin words "hydro" meaning water and "genes" meaning giving birth, is more appropriate for this gas. The world also agrees with Lavoisier that today we call this gas hydrogen.

Even the Russians use the literal translation into Russian, varda-rod, water-bearer.

He named oxygen by combining the Latin words "oksyd", meaning acid (sharp, sour), and "genes", meaning the one who gives birth, that is, the one who creates.

One is the gas that makes water, hydrogen. The other is the acid-forming gas, oxygen. Water is the oxidized form of hydrogen, just like iron oxide.

Lavoisier used a really long rifle barrel in his "gun barrel experiment". He passed the water vapor through the barrel, which he made very hot, and saw that the oxygen in the water oxidized the inside of the barrel by darkening it, and hydrogen gas emerged from the other end of the barrel. He went down in history as the person who succeeded in separating water into its components for the first time.

Of course, there was no electricity yet at that time, but he managed to separate the hydrogen in water with a different method.

Today we can understand chemically how this could happen, but in those years he was probably a magician.

You give off steam from one end, and you get flammable steam from the other end!

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William Nicholson is yet another English chemist who lived between 1753 and 1815.

The scientist who was the first to decompose water into oxygen and hydrogen gases by electrolysis using the electric battery discovered by Alessandro Volta in 1800!

He is the person who experimentally implemented Alessandro Volta's ideas on electricity. Volta is more of a calculating person.

Nicholson also sieves by chemical reaction.

He was the first person to produce electricity, and at the same time, he discovered voltaic current, and this discovery made him the most famous scientist of that day.

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Yes, the discovery of hydrogen, which I see and predict as the "fuel of the future", has gone through these stages.

I have written many articles about fuel hydrogen before, but I think I have not talked about the historical discovery and scientific development of hydrogen as in this article.

Of course, hydrogen is the first element in the periodic table and is the lightest element in nature.

With this feature, it was actually used in zeppelins once upon a time.

Before that, zinc was added to acids for days and was used in basket balloons, which we know are used for touristic purposes today.

However, although hydrogen is the lightest gas, its flammable properties caused the zeppelins to be abandoned as an aircraft, especially due to the death of many passengers as a result of a zeppelin accident (the "Hindenburg" zeppelin accident), and this accident also led to the abandonment of hot air in today's touristic balloons. It paved the way for the use of air or helium gas.

Helium is a very light but very costly gas like hydrogen, while hot air is more economical in terms of cost. After all, since they are both safer, both are suitable for touristic balloons today.

By the way, as far as I know, zeppelins are still in use, albeit smaller in size, especially for meteorological purposes.

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Doesn't this flammable property of hydrogen prevent it from being used as fuel in automobiles?

Actually no, its storage is not much more dangerous than LPG gas storage, so adequate precautions must be taken. The warehouse needs to be built very solidly.

However, there is no problem such as sudden burning or flashing when used in automobiles because of the special filter block used to generate electricity from ionized hydrogen. This process is a highly controlled oxidation.

As a result, it is very important for automobiles to release water vapor into the air instead of exhaust gases that pollute the air, in terms of preventing environmental pollution. Therefore, hydrogen can be considered the most effective fuel in this sense.

However, the production of hydrogen must also be done through green energies. I have touched upon this issue in previous articles.

When you try to produce hydrogen largely from natural gas, as is the case today, no matter whether automobiles have released those toxic gases into the atmosphere or hydrogen production facilities, nothing makes a difference.

Anyway, I have already written about these topics before.

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I think we owe a debt of gratitude to Henry Cavendish and other valuable scientists for their contributions to the world of science.

Let me finish by saying stay with science.

With love and respect to everyone from Moscow