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Introduction to General Inorganic Chemistry
Introduction to General Inorganic Chemistry Author:Alexander Smith General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1906 Original Publisher: The Century Co. Subjects: Chemistry Inorganic Historical Science / Chemistry / General Science / Chemistry / Inorganic Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. ... more » When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V OXYGEN Historical and Introductory. -- Almost one-quarter of the atmosphere, by weight, is free oxygen. Water contains nearly 89 per cent of oxygen in combination, and this element constitutes about 50 per cent of common materials like sandstone, limestone, brick, and mortar. On account of its predominance over other elements in quantity, and the exceptional capacity which it exhibits for forming compounds with a great variety of other elements, the systematic study of chemistry may conveniently be begun with oxygen. While many elements which are less easily obtainable than oxygen have been recognized as distinct substances for many centuries, oxygen did not attain this position until it was first prepared by Priestley in 1774. The reason of this was that gases are not so easy to handle and distinguish as solids or liquids, and consequently very slow progress was made in the study of them. Priestley was particularly interested in examining the nature of the gases which were evolved by some materials when heated. His plan was to fill an elongated glass vessel with mercury (Fig. 19); to invert this in a trough filled with the same metal, and, after allowing the substance under examination to float up into the top of the tube above the mercury, to expose it to the rays of the sun concentrated by a large burning lens. Priestley found that one material, then known as "mercurius calcinatusper se" (mercuric oxide), gave off an unusual amount of a gas, or ...« less