Nitrogen compounds have a very long history, ammonium chloride was known to Herodotus. They were very well known in the Middle Ages. Alchemists knew nitric acid as aqua fortis (strong water) and other nitrogen compounds such as ammonium salts and nitrate salts. The mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids was known as aqua regia (royal water) and was famous for its ability to dissolve gold, the king of metals.
Discovery of the Element of Nitrogen
The discovery of nitrogen is attributed to the Scottish Doctor Daniel Rutherford in 1772 and Rutherford named nitrogen as harmful air. He clearly distinguished it from Joseph Black's "fixed air," or carbon dioxide, although he did not consider it a completely different chemical. The fact that air has a component that does not support combustion was clear to Rutherford, but he was not aware that it was an element. Nitrogen was also studied by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Henry Cavendish, and Joseph Priestley and named as burnt air or phlogisticated air.
While Rutherford wasn't aware that it was an element, he was aware that it was a part of the air that prevented combustion. In the same period, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, and Carl Wilhelm Scheele studied nitrogen; they referred to it as burnt air or phlogisticated air.
Because nitrogen gas is suffocating, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier called it "mephitic air" or nitrogene, which means "no life" in Greek (azotikos). The animals perished in an all-nitrogen environment and the flames were extinguished.
Although the term "Lavoisier" was not originally adopted in English because all gases except oxygen are asphyxiating or completely poisonous, it is still used in English in the common names of many nitrogen compounds, such as hydrazine and compounds of the azide I family. French, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Albanian, Turkish etc. It is used in many other languages, including The nitrogen-led group was eventually given the term "pnictogens", from the Greek verb πνίγειν meaning "to drown".
The French expression nitrogène, created by the French chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756-1832), in 1790 and derived from the word nitre (potassium nitrate, today known as saltpeter) and the French suffix -gène "to create", from the Greek -v, English nitrogen ( 1794) gave rise to the word. According to Chaptal, nitrogen is a very important component of nitric acid, which is produced from nitre. In the past, niter was confused with the Egyptian "natron" (sodium carbonate), which has the Greek name (nitron) but does not contain nitrates.
Among the first uses of nitrogen compounds in the army, industry and agriculture were saltpeter (sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate), most famously gunpowder and later as fertilizer. The formation of "active nitrogen", a monatomic allotrope of nitrogen, by electrical discharge in nitrogen gas was discovered in 1910 by Lord Rayleigh. His device created a "swirling cloud of dazzling yellow light" that, when combined with mercury, forms explosive mercury nitride.
Sources of nitrogen compounds were scarce for a very long time. Natural sources were either from biological processes or from nitrate deposits created by atmospheric processes. This lack of nitrogen compounds was exacerbated by industrial processes that fix nitrogen, such as the Haber-Bosch process (1908-1913) and the Frank-Caro process (1895-1899). As a result, artificial nitrogen fertilizers are now used in half of the world's food production (see Applications). At the same time, the Ostwald method (1902), which used industrial nitrogen fixation to make nitrates, enabled the large-scale industrial production of nitrates as raw materials for making explosives during the 20th century World Wars.
Source: Wikipedia
Günceleme: 12/01/2023 14:04
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