Overview

As the nineteenth century dawned a significant problem that remained in the chemical sciences was the ultimate nature of matter. Was matter continuous and therefore had no finer structure or was it discontinuous and thus made of tiny particles? The chemical revolution due to the work of Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) and his circle that had occurred in the last two decades of the eighteenth century had clarified the concept of what elements are, developed a comprehensive and consistent vocabulary of chemistry, and led to the introduction of quantitative methods in chemical investigations. However, to fully understand the nature of chemical reactions one needed to have a way to visualize how the elements combined together. The atomic theory of matter as proposed by John...