1779-1848

Swedish Chemist

The most renowned chemist of the first third of the nineteenth century, Jöns Jacob Berzelius excelled as a theorist, experimenter, teacher, designer of laboratory equipment, and disseminator of chemical information. He invented the modern system of chemical notation; named such chemical concepts as isomerism, isomorphism, allotropy, and catalysis; and discovered the chemical elements of cerium, selenium, and thorium.

Descended from three generations of Lutheran clergy, Berzelius lost his father at age two and his mother at age nine and was raised by relatives. He began medical studies in Uppsala in 1796 and completed them in 1802, thereafter making a meager living as a district doctor to the poor while working as an unpaid assistant to the professor of pharmacy at the School of Surgery in Stockholm. His fortunes improved upon succeeding to the professorship in 1807, which in 1810 was...