A website designed to gather and organize information related to scientific/historical traveling.
It was developed in connection with the 2002 Allegheny College ACCEL Study Tour entitled
Traveling with the
Atom: 
London
and Paris
Click
Here for Description, Itinerary, Participants, and Pictures
and the Alumni College 2002 course entitled
Alumni College 2002:
Traveling with the Atom
Class
Titles and Reading Assignments
 |
A major reference
for both of these groups was the book Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a
Chemical Boyhood,
Oliver Sacks, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. (Click on the image for ordering information.) |
The website is organized
by personalities seminal to the development of the atomic concept.
These are presented
below in approximately chronological order.
| Scientist | Dates | Contribution | Page references in Sacks book |
| Joseph Priestley |
|
Discovery of oxygen (dephlogisticated air) | pp 109-111 |
| Antoine Lavoisier |
|
Law of Conservation of Mass | pp 106-112; 117-118 |
| John Dalton |
|
First Concrete Atomic Theory | pp 147-155 |
| Jöns Jacob Berzelius |
|
Categories of chemistry; symbols of elements; discovery of selenium, cerium, thorium, and silicon | p 152; p 197 |
| Dmitrii Mendeleev |
|
First Periodic Table; Predictions of New Elements | pp 195-202 |
| Humphry Davy |
|
Discovery of 1A and 2A Metals | pp 117-131 |
| J. J. Thomson |
|
Discovery of the electron; m/e ratio of the electron; plum-pudding model of the atom | p 244; 288 |
| Wilhelm Roentgen |
|
Discoverer of X-rays and applications of | pp 245-247 |
| Marie and Pierre Curie |
Pierre: 1859-1906 |
Radioactivity; discoverers of radium and polonium | pp 254-267; 281 |
| Ernest Rutherford |
|
Nuclear atom; first transmutation of nuclides | p 282; 288-290 |
| Robert Bunsen |
|
Spectroscope; discoverer of rubidium and cesium | pp 215-218 |
| James Clerk Maxwell |
|
Electromagnetic Laws | p 140; pp 167-169; 296 |
| Niels Bohr |
|
Electron Quantization | pp 297-301 |
| Scientist | Dates | Contribution | Page references in Sacks book |
| Hennig Brandt |
|
Discovery of phosphorus | pp 225-227 |
| Robert Boyle |
|
Definition of element; Boyle's Law | pp 102-105; 226 |
| Giordano Bruno |
|
Burned at the stake for believing in atoms |
|
| Benjamin Franklin |
|
Electrostatics; encourager of Priestley |
|
| Carl Wilhelm Scheele |
|
Co-discoverer of oxygen | |
| Joseph-Louis Proust |
|
Law of Definite Composition | pp 148-149 |
| Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac |
|
Law of Combining Volumes |
|
| Amedeo Avogadro |
|
Avogadro's Number; diatomic molecules | p 152ff |
| Stanislao Cannizzaro |
|
Avogadro's advocate at Karlsruhe conference | pp 154-155, 197 |
| Johann Dobereiner |
|
Triads | p 197 |
| John Newlands |
|
Law of Octaves | p 201 |
| Julius Lothar Meyer |
|
Co-discoverer of the periodic law | p 202 |
| Clemens Winkler |
|
Discovery of germanium | p 200 |
| Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran |
|
Discovery of gallium | p 200 |
| Alessandro Volta |
|
Voltaic Pile | p 119 |
| Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) |
|
Established the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat; Founded the Royal Institution |
|
| Michael Faraday |
|
Electromagnetic Radiation | pp 125, 127, 165-166 |
| John William Strutt (3rd Lord Rayleigh) |
|
Investigation of Prout's Law |
|
| William Ramsay |
|
Discovery of Inert Gases | pp 201-202 |
| Morris Travers |
|
Discovery of Inert Gases |
|
| Friedrich Dorn |
|
Discovery of radon |
|
| William Crookes |
|
Early work on Cathode Rays |
|
| Antoine Henri Becquerel |
|
Discovery of radioactivity | pp 250-253 |
| Hans Geiger |
|
Counter; Rutherford post-doc | p 288 |
| Henry Moseley |
|
X-rays & atomic number | p 284 |
| James Chadwick |
|
Discovery of the neutron | NA |
| Francis Aston |
|
Mass spectrometer |
|
| Lord William Thomson Kelvin |
|
Temperature scale | p 284 |
| Frederick Soddy |
|
Isotopes (with Rutherford) | pp 282ff; 288-290 |
| Isaac Newton |
|
Light Theory (corpuscles) | pp 102, 109, 113, 118, 125, 127, 214, 227, 265 |
| Christian Huygens |
|
Light Theory (wave theory) |
|
| Gustav Kirchhoff |
|
Spectroscopy; Discovery of cesium and rubidium | pp 215-218 |
| Ferdinand Reich |
|
Spectroscopic Discovery of Indium |
|
| Joseph Norman Lockyer |
|
Spectroscopic Discovery of Helium |
|
| Joseph von Fraunhofer |
|
Absorption Lines of the Sun |
|
| Alfred Nobel |
|
Founder of the Nobel Prizes |
|
| Max Planck |
|
Quantization of Energy |
|
|
|
|
|
| Scientific Historical Traveling | Rodgers Home Page | Chemistry 110 | Chemistry 110 Websites | Chemistry 222 |