victorian era science experiments

Under Victorian Microscopes, an Enchanted World

When it came time to describe what they saw under microscopes, Victorians couldn’t help but perceive a real-life fairyland.

Interest in natural history may have reached its peak in Victorian-era Great Britain, and a major driver of the craze was microscopes. As they became more powerful and more affordable, microscopy became an increasingly popular hobby. Gazing through these “magic glasses” rendered previously unseen worlds, which teemed with tiny living creatures, newly visible. When it came time to describe what they were seeing, people frequently turned to the language of the fantastical.

“Naturalists and lay users readily used a vocabulary drawn from fairy literature to… convey the incomprehensible strangeness and minutiae of the microscopic world,” writes the historian Laura Forsberg in “ Nature’s Invisibilia: The Victorian Microscope and the Miniature Fairy ” ( Victorian Studies 2015). “Though the link may seem incongruous, a surprisingly substantial body of Victorian scientific literature and fairy stories connect microscopes to fairies.”

In an 1846 lecture, the naturalist Charles Kingsley explained, “in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land.” In 1861, before becoming president of the Royal Microscopical Society, Henry Slack described a group of protozoa as “a tree from fairy-land, in which every leaf has a sentient life.” In her lecture “Magic Glasses and How to Use Them,” later published in an 1890 collection, the spiritualist popularizer of science Arabella Buckley declared: “the slime from a rock-pool teems with fairy forms darting about.” Under microscopes, Victorians couldn’t help but perceive a real-life fairyland.

“Like the microscope, the fairy offered Victorians a means of imaginatively reconceptualizing the natural world as a place of minute wonders; the microscope revealed real, living particles in the crevices of nature, while fairy texts imagined mushrooms and flower buds populated with miniature fairies,” Forsberg explains.

Microscopy simultaneously demystified the natural world and rendered previously undetected creatures visible. For a Victorian, being able to see what was once hidden implied that there was yet more about the natural world to be uncovered and discovered. When the world of fancy risked being entirely debunked by newly discovered rational-scientific explanations, people began ascribing fairy-like characteristics to microscopic creatures as a way to re-inject a sense of divine mystery into nature. In this way, fairies often acted as a replacement for God in popular science books: the wonders of fairyland substituted for the majesty of creation.

“Writers of imaginative literature frequently used scientific discoveries to give credence to their fanciful inventions,” Forsberg writes, noting that in particular, “fairy authors and illustrators drew upon microscopic discoveries to lend a sense of reality to their unbelievable imaginings.”

In Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture , author Laurence Talairach-Vielmas makes a similar observation: “If science appeared to disenchant the world, scientists increasingly explaining away the mysteries of natural phenomena, Victorian popularizers [of science] played a key part in presenting the natural world as enchanting and entrancing: although the wonders of science could account for the mysteries of nature, nature nonetheless remained a fairyland.”

Since natural history and other science subjects weren’t widely studied in school during this time, books on these topics “belonged to the world of the nursery, a realm of women instructors,” Talairach-Vielmas points out. Many texts from the time that marry natural science and fairies are geared toward women and children, such as John Cargill Brough’s The Fairy Tales of Science: A Book for Youth (1859), Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), or Arabella Buckley’s The Fairy-Land of Science (1878), among others.

The orientation toward children added to the popularization of the concept that fairies are miniscule. The idea that fairies are anything but tiny may seem odd to us now, but at the time, they tended to be thought of as being about the size of a small child. Shakespeare hinted at the idea of tiny fairies in his plays, but the idea didn’t really take hold in Great Britain until around the nineteenth century. Talairach-Vielmas asserts that both Kingsley’s and Buckley’s fairy-laden science tales in particular were “attempts to play with scale in order to adapt to the diminutive world of the child.”

But the effect was not confined to the nursery. Multiple scientific advances of the time— such as those that helped make microscopy and telescopy available to the general public—conspired to upend the Victorians’ sense of scale in general. Some writers of the era began to lament the loss of belief in fairies caused by the rise of rational thought. But Forsberg observes that “the same scientific discoveries that eliminated belief in the child-sized fairies of superstition also opened up the possibility of fairies on a miniature scale.” Not to mention that the concept of miniature worlds “captivated both readers of microscopic literature and audiences of fairy texts.” So, by “tethering fairy imaginings to recent microscopic discoveries,” these magical creatures enjoyed a cultural renaissance.

Given the intended audience of these texts, it makes sense that illustrations were a key feature. The fairy books thus had an impact not just on literature and the sciences, but also on the visual arts. Painters and other creative artists of the era viewed this newly uncovered microscopic fairyland as an opportunity that practically demanded imaginary reconstruction.

“The microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible. This had reverberations not least for the visual arts,” the art historian Ursula Seibold-Bultmann explains in “ Monster Soup: The Microscope and Victorian Fantasy ” ( Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2000). “The metaphors chosen by authors attempting to describe the microscopic world soon developed a visual presence, with supernatural features being projected even onto illustrations in supposedly scientific contexts.”

Seibold-Bultmann believes it’s no coincidence that the golden age of British fairy painting overlaps chronologically with the Victorian microscopy craze. But she also can’t help but wonder whether looking to the real world for inspiration was liberating or perhaps limiting to the creative arts.

For the sciences, at least, the injection of fairies and other fantastical elements appears to have been a good thing. Fairies were used to champion the value of imagination, curiosity, and an open mind as essential components in scientific inquiry. They also helped show the power of fantasy and entertainment in engaging young learners in otherwise dry subjects.

But it wasn’t all fun and fancy. As often as fairies were trotted out to underscore the wonders of the natural world, they were deployed to express doubt in scientific findings. And the microscope itself was used to argue both for and against the existence of fairies. The microscope, thus, embodied a dichotomy, fulfilling two seemingly disparate purposes: an instrument of serious scientific study and a gateway into the realm of miniature living beings.

Forsberg cites the 1858 short story The Diamond Lens to illustrate how the fairy represented humanity’s complicated relationship to nature. The story tells the tale of a scientist who discovers a graceful, delicate female creature in a droplet of water under the lens of his super-powered microscope. He falls in love with this “sylph,” and spends all of his time gazing at her, rejecting regular-size human women. Eventually, the scientist sees that the creature is dying because he has let the water on the slide dry up. His selfishness has led to her demise.

Fairies perhaps represented an attempt to assuage the tensions between science and spirituality, a balm for the myriad crises of faith that had arisen as a result of evolutionary theory. Since neither could be seen, some amount of faith was required for belief in both a Creator and in the new scientific theory of evolution. Besides, evolutionary science seemed to suggest that magical transformations of all kinds were indeed possible, so perhaps people were capable of both spiritual and physical transformation.

“Rather than opposing one another, scientific discoveries and fairy fictions reinforced each other’s imaginative appeal,” Forsberg notes. “By combining scientific observation with fanciful imagination, both the fairy and the microscope produced a sense of wonder.”

The Victorian predilection for portraying microscopic creatures as fairy-like left an indelible imprint on the natural sciences. Forsberg suggests that, in this way, the microscope permanently transformed people’s imaginative relationship to nature: “[H]aving once gazed through the microscope’s lens at a sample of pond scum and seen the dozens of miniscule creatures living there, the user might imagine in any body of water the billions of microscopic creatures concealed from view.”

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Chemistry Timeline, 1755-1901: Victorian Chemistry in Context

Ray dyer, royal institute of chemistry.

[ Victorian Web Home —> Science —> Chemistry ]

From such a wealth of materials and events, any chronology inevitably is a selection from the author/editor’s interests and preferences. The chronology below has attempted to be non-technical and thus more available to historians and non-chemists.

1755 Joseph Black (Great Britain), Experiments upon Magnesia, Quicklime and other Alkaline Substances, discovers “fixed air” (carbonic-acid gas, carbon dioxide).

1760-66 Henry Cavendish (Great Britain), at Cambridge, studies “inflammable air” (hydrogen), and shows water to be a union of two gases. [see 1805-06]

1767 Joseph Priestly (Great Britain) experiments at Leeds with mineral acids and gases of air. Discovers “inert air” (nitrogen) 1772 [independently of Daniel Rutherford], and “fire air” (oxygen) 1775 [independently of Scheele].

1774 Karl Wilhelm Scheele (Sweden) discovers chlorine; later glycerine, tungsten and < hydrogen sulphide gas 1781. Early respiratory death from chlorine-poisoning.

1778-88 ANTOINE LAURENT LAVOISIER (France) proves air to be a mixture of gases; introduces names ‘oxygen’ and ‘nitrogen’; disproves Stahl’s animistic Phlogiston Theory of 1694; elevates chemistry to a modern experimental empirical-deductive and rational science. Methode de Nomenclature chymique (with Claude Bertholet), uses present-day chemical symbols [ C, H, N, O etc.].

1785 Bertholet (France) shows ammonia to be a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen.

1786 Martin Klaproth (Germany) discovers uranium; also zirconium, strontium, titanium.

1789 Lavoisier, Traite elementaire de Chimie, founds modern approach to Chemistry. Produces Table of Thirty-One Chemical Elements, 1790. [See 1869]. Executed in French Revolution.

1790 Thomas Wedgwood (Great Britain) studies photo-chemistry of silver nitrate. [1827]

1791 Nicholas Leblanc (France) produces his soda-carbonate industrial process. [1863]

1792 Philadelphia Chemical Society founded. [1846] — F. Accum (Germany) in England, pioneers use of coal-gas for street-lamps. [1820]

1796 Pure ethyl alcohol prepared, by Lowitz.

1797 Nicholas de Saussure (France), Recherches chimiques sur la vegetation. — William Nicholson (Great Britain), London waterworks chemist, founds Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and the Arts . — Vauquelin (France) discovers chromium; later, isolates first amino-acid, asparagine, from the vegetable.

1800 Nicholson constructs first voltaic-pile in England; discovers electrolytic dissociation of water into gases. — Humphrey Davy lectures at Royal Institution, London, ‘Researches, chemical and philosophical, concerning nitrous oxide’.

1801 Franz Achard (Germany), in Silesia, perfects Marggraf’s [1747] process for large-scale production of sugar from beet crop.

1801-1802 John Dalton (Great Britain) evolves pioneer atomic theory for chemistry. [1808]

1803 William Henry (Great Britain), ‘Henry’s Law’ of dissolving gases. — J. J. Berzelius (Sweden) discovers cerium [rare-earth metal] [see 1839].

1804 W. H. Wollaston (Great Britain) discovers palladium and rhodium metals.

1805 R. Dutrochet (France) studies/names ‘osmosis’ [after Nollet’s discovery, 1748]. — Friedrich Serturner (Germany) apothecary, isolates/studies first alkaloid-opiate, morphine, from opium [see 1820].

1805-1806 Gay-Lussac (France) finds water to be 2 parts hydrogen to 1 part oxygen.

1806 Joseph Proust (France) establishes Proust’s Law of constant chemical proportions. — H. Davy prepares sodium and potassium metals by electrolysis of salts; in 1808 he prepares magnesium, calcium, strontium and barium [alkaline-earth metals].

1808 Gay-Lussac (France), Law of Combining Volumes of Gases. — Dalton, J., New System of Chemical Philosophy. [1801-02]

1811 Amedeo Avogadro (Italy), ‘Avogadro’s hypothesis’ on gases [see 1858]. — Samuel Hahnemann (Germany), ‘Precept of Pure Drugs’, a homeopathic pharmacopeia. [ Pharmacopeia Londinensis , 1618, Royal College of Physicians, still available in Britain]. [1820]

1812 Humphrey Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy.

1813 M. Orfila (Esp.), Traite de toxicologie generale. [see 1805, 1820] — Courtois (France) discovers iodine. [1878]

1814 J. J. Berzelius, ‘Theory of Chemical Proportions’, based on atomic weights; gives support to Dalton’s [1802] atomic theory.

1815 William Prout (Great Britain) relates atomic wts. to specific gravities, and arrives at ‘Prout’s hypothesis’ for fundamental status of simple hydrogen atom.

1817 Berzelius discovers selenium [Se] and lithium [Li]; thorium [Th] in 1828.

1818 Berzelius publishes mol. wts. of two thousand compounds; introduces many new chemical symbols. — Stromeyer & Hermann discover cadmium [Cd].

1819 Eilhard Mitscherlich (Germany), working with crystalline phosphates and arsenates, establishes new concept of isomorphism for crystals. — P. Dulong (France) and A. Petit establish ‘Dulong & Petit’s Law’ for specific-heats as an early approach to atomic weights.

1820 F. Accum, A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, London. — Pelletier and Caventou (France) discover alkaloid quinine; later strychnine, brucine. — United States Pharmacopeia , 1st edition. [1811, 1846, 1852]

1822 Leopold Gmelin (Germany) discovers potassium ferricyanide, ‘Gmelin’s salt’; later introduces terms ester and ketone into organic chemistry; ‘Gmelin’s test’ for bile pigments. [See 1849, 1852, 1881]

1823 Michael Faraday (Great Britain) liquefies chlorine; discovers coal-tar benzene [1825], and studies the candle-flame. [See 1834]

c.1825 Phosphorous matches invented; much attention to improvements.

1827 Sulphur friction-matches invented by John Walker.

1826 Otto Unverdorben (Germany) discovers aniline oil, from distillation of indigo plant. Antoine Balard (France) discovers bromine [Br].

1827 Joseph Niepce (France) produces photographic image on metal plate covered with silver salts [1790, 1838]. — Robert Brown (Great Britain) observes “Brownian movement” of colloidal particles agitated by [implied] molecular vibrations of liquids. — Friedrich Wohler (Germany) obtains aluminium [Al] from clays; Beryllium [1828].

1828 Wohler synthesises a first organic compound, urea, [ CO(NH2)2] from the inorganic salt, ammonium cyanate, presaging the conceptual unification of the organic and inorganic domains, and a blow to vitalism [see 1845, 1852, 1865]

1829 J. W. Dobereiner (Germany) notes similarities in certain groups of elements, e.g.chlorine, bromine and iodine - ‘Dobereiner’s triads’ - [see 1864, 1869]. — William Odling (Great Britain) at Oxford, classifies the silicates.

c.1830 Chile begins exports of nitrate fertilizers — Chile saltpetre — which by 1870 will eclipse Peruvian ‘guano’ from accumulated seabird droppings [rich in oxalates, nitrogenous urates, phosphates]. [1898] — Reichenbach (Germany) discovers paraffin in coal-tar creosote-fraction. — P. J. Kipp (Ned.) begins chemical glassware production at Delft: ‘Kipp’s apparatus’ becomes standard laboratory-ware.

1831 S. Guthrie (United States) and J. von Liebig (Germany) independently discover chloroform.

1832 Reichenbach prepares medical creosote from wood-tar.

1834 Faraday publishes ‘The Laws of Electrolysis’.

Runge (Germany) discovers phenol in coal-tar; first synthetic dye soon follows - ‘acid green’,1835. [See 1856]

1836 John Daniell (Great Britain) produces his ‘wet cell’ battery, using zinc/copper sulphates in solution, with zinc rod and copper canister. — Inflammable acetylene gas discovered by E. Davey.

1838 Louis Daguerre (France) invents his ‘Daguerrotype’ single-image copper photo-plate. [1839]

1839 Henry Fox Talbot (Great Britain) publishes details of his ‘calotype’ [paper] negative-positive process, which since c.1835 had used “chloride of silver”, ‘fixing’ with sodium thiosulphite: in Comptes Rendus, and quickly adopted by Daguerre.

Schonbein (Swiss) discovers and names ozone gas.

Charles Goodyear (United States) discovers ‘vulcanization’ - hardening of natural rubber [from Brazil-Amazon trees] with sulphur [S].

C. G. Mosander (Sweden) discovers ‘rare earth’ metal lanthanum [La, “lies hidden”] in cerium salt [1803]; erbium [Er], 1843.

1840 Justus von Liebig (Germany), carbon and nitrogen cycles; artificial fertilizers. — Boussingault (France) experimentally supports Liebig’s cycles. ‘Liebig condenser’.

G. H. Hess (Swiss) produces ‘heat theorem’ and Hess’s Law [Phys. Chem.]

1840s Auguste Laurent (France) isolates coal-tar anthracene; nucleus theory of organic radicals. [1849, 1852]

1841 Fritsch (Germany) treats indigo plant with alkali to obtain aniline. [1826, 1856]

1845 Kolbe (Germany) synthesises acetic acid [vinegar], against vitalism. [1828]

1846 Thomas Graham (Great Britain) widely held to have founded Physical Chem., with his

Morton (United States) pioneers use of ether [diethyl ether] as dental anaesthetic. Philadelphia College of Pharmacy (William Proctor Jr., Professor) [1792, 1820]

1847 Hermann Koppe (Germany), Geschichte der Chemie .

1848 J. Mitchell (Great Britain), A Treatise on the Falsification of Foods, and the Chemical Means Employed to Detect Them . Paris: Bailliere et fils. [available 2016, as print-on-demand, various editions, www.abebooks.com]. [1820]

1849 Edward Frankland (Great Britain), doctoral dissertation, Marburg, Ueber die Isolirung des Aethyls: Isolation of diethyl radicals, then controversial; developed into organometallic compounds, e.g. diethylzinc. [1850, Bunsen/cacodyl] [1866] [See ferrocene, Pauson & Kealy,1951].

Gmelin, L., Textbook of Inorganic Chemistry . Heidelberg. [1822, 1881]

1850 Robert von Bunsen (Germany) introduces his modified bench ‘burner’; involved with ‘cacodyl’[from Gk. kakodes = stinking] compounds [arsines, dimethylarsine, cacodylic acid] [1849, 1859-60]

1852 American Pharmaceutical Association founded in Philadelphia. [1820, 1846]

1852-60 E. Frankland, early valency theory and chemical bonds.

1853-56 C. F. Gerhardt, (France), Traite de chimie organique, 4 vols., Paris [‘New Theory of Organic Compounds’]. Influenced August Kekule [1859].

1854 Heinrich Geissler (Germany), scientific glass-making. [see Kipp, 1830].

1855 A. Parkes (Great Britain), first plastic solid, from evaporation of photographic collodion.

1856 William H. Perkin (Great Britain) synthesises aniline mauve with A. W. von Hofmann; inaugurates coal-tar aniline-dyestuffs industry. [See 1875, von Baeyer]

1858 S. Cannizzaro (Italy) rethinks Avogadro’s 1811 ‘Hypothesis’ on atomic and molecular weights; presents at the Karlsruhe Congress, 1860. He had earlier proven the iconic ‘Cannizarro reaction’[1853], whereby an aromatic aldehyde can be decomposed into its constituent aromatic acid and aromatic alcohol.

1859 A. Kekule (Germany) works on chain-theory of organic compounds. [1865]

William Crookes (Great Britain) founds Chemical News [to 1906]; discovers thallium [Tl] in 1861.

1859-60 Bunsen and Kirchoff at Heidelberg improve prism-spectrometer/spectrum analysis: discover caesium [Cs] and rubidium [Rb]. [1868]

1860 Ludwig Mond moves from Germany to England; builds large alkali plant; Mond Nickel Co., 1900.

1863 Ernest Solvay (Belgium) invents Solvay Process for manufacture of sodium carbonate for glass and soap industries. [1791]

1864 John Newlands (Great Britain) notes a ‘Rule of octaves’ for similarities at each 8th element in periodic ‘Table’ order of ascending atomic weights [1829, 1869]. — J. von Baeyer (Germany) synthesizes barbituric acid [barbiturates]. [1875]

1865 M. Berthelot (France) performs many organic syntheses which demonstrate essential unity of organic-inorganic domains. [1828, 1852] — Kekule (Germany) famously dreams his ring-structure for benzene and related aromatic compounds [aided by organic theories of Dumas, Gerhardt].

1866 Frankland, E., Lecture notes for chemical students: embracing mineral and organic chemistry. London: Van Voorst. [1868] — Alfred Nobel (Sweden) invents safer explosives: dynamite, and gelignite, 1875; ballistite, 1889. [See 1901]

1867 von Hofmann (Germany) prepares formaldehyde, HCHO. [1856, coal-tar aniline].

1868 German Chemical Society founded by von Hofmann et al. — Helium [He] discovered by spectroscope [1859-60] in atmosphere of the Sun, by Lockyer and Frankland [see 1887, 1894]. — Hyatt (United States) uses camphor/plasticizer for cellulose nitrate: ‘celluloid’/polymer.

1869 Dmitri Mendeleyev (Russia) perfects his Periodic Table of Elements, based on their atomic masses. Lothar Meyer (Germany) independently produces one similar. [In 1913-14 Henry Moseley, at Manchester University under Rutherford, would revise these Tables, by use of the more accurate atomic numbers].

Mege-Mouries (France) invents margarine from hydrogenated fats/oils. [1872]

Louis Pasteur (France) Prof. Chemistry, Paris-Sorbonne; moves to medical biology.

1872 F. Boudet (France) discovers emulsification to improve margarines. [1869, 1884]

1874 J. van’t Hoff (Ned.) deduces asymmetry of carbon-bonds. [1901]

1875 Boisbaudran (France) discovers gallium [Ga], samarium [Sm] and dysprosium [Dy]. — (Johann) Adolf von Baeyer (Germany), Prof. Organic Chem., Munich, to 1915. His major synthesis of indigo dye, 1878-80, from isatin etc., with structural studies; [Nobel Chem. 1905]. See 1856 [aniline-dyes from natural indigo]. — R.H. Chittenden (United States) isolates glycogen. [1898]

1876 Rudolf Fittig (Germany) devises ‘Fittig reaction’ of organic compounds with sodium. — J. W. Gibbs (United States), ‘On the equilibrium of heterogeneous systems’ [Phys. Chem.]

W. Kuhne discovers digestive trypsin; introduces term enzume. [See 1897]

1877 Ernst Hoppe-Selyer (Germany) founds Zeitschrift fur physiologische Chemie, first biochemistry journal. [1890s, 1898]

1878 yellow iodoform crystals, from ethyl alcohol and iodine, used as antiseptic.

1879 saccharin [benzoic sulfimide] synthesised by Fahlberg & Remser at Johns Hopkins University.

1880s Eduard and Hans Buchner (Germany) at Munich show alcoholic fermentation to be due to non-vitalist chemical processes; ‘Buchner flask’. [1897]

1881 F. K. Beilstein, (Russia) founds Handbuch der organischen Chemie , ‘Handbook of Organic Chemistry’, encyclopaedic catalogue of 1,500 organic compounds in 2 vols.; 3rd edn, 1893-1900, 4 vols with further 4 vols of supplements, edited by German Chemical Society [later format, ‘Beilstein database’, Elsevier, Frankfurt: millions of electronic entries] [Cf. ‘Gmelin database’, Elsevier: organometals].

1884 Paul Sabatier (France) Prof. Chem. at Toulouse to 1905; catalysts for hydrogenation in synthetic margarine and methanol industries. [Nobel Chem. 1912]

1885 Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler (Germany) employ petroleum-fraction [gasoline] in single-cylinder motor-engine.

1886 Henri Moisson (France) isolates fluorine [F]; develops electric furnace and makes carborundum [silicon carbide, SiC]; synthetic diamonds. [Nobel 1906 ] [1891]. — Lever Bros. (Great Britain) produce soaps from vegetable oils - ‘Sunlight soap’. — Aminopyrine and acetanilide [precursors of aspirin] synthesised. [1897-99]. — C. M. Hall (United States) and Heroult (France) each produce aluminium by electrolysis.

1887 J. Lockyer, The Chemistry of the Sun, London: Macmillan & Co. [see 1868] [First editions, and/or 2015 print-on-demand, available at www.abebooks.co ] — H. W. Goodwin invents new film from celluloid [1868]; Eastman’s celluloid roll-film, 1889. — Analgesic-febrifugal drug phenacetin prepared [1886, 1897-99]. — Wilhelm Ostwald (Germany), Leipzig; nitric acid process; catalysts for petrochemical industry. [Nobel 1909]

1889 F. Abel and J. Dewar (Great Britain) invent cordite explosive. [1866]

1890s Emil Fischer (Germany) syntheses and structural studies of sugars; foundation biochemistry. [Nobel Chem. 1902] [1877, 1900].

1891 Herman Frasch (United States) develops ‘Frasch process’ for steam-extraction of sulphur. — E. G. Acheson (United States) develops uses of carborundum; and of colloidal graphit lubricants, 1896.

1894 Lord Rayleigh & William Ramsay (Great Britain) isolate inert/‘noble’ gases: argon [Ar], with a residual atmospheric ‘fraction’; Helium [He], 1896; xenon [Xe], krypton [Kr] and neon [Ne], 1898, Ramsay & Travers. [see Dorn, 1900]. [Nobel 1904]

1896 S. Arrhenius (Sweden) calculates atmospheric carbon dioxide; studies in theory of electrolytic dissociation. [Nobel 1903]

1897 Rudolf Diesel (France) demonstrates new compression-injection engine using heavy petroleum-fraction. [Lost overboard in curious accident, 1913].

J. J. Thomson (Great Britain) discovers the electron in cathode-rays [Nobel 1906]. — E. Buchner (Germany) discovers enzyme ‘zymase’ [1880s] [Nobel Chem. 1907]. — Henry Dow (United States) forms Dow Chemical Co.

1897-99 Bayer Co.-GmbH (Germany) perfects analgesic drug aspirin [acetylsalicylic acid],<[see 1886, 1887]

1898 Chittenden [see 1875] at Yale University, creates new academic dept. of biochemistry [then ‘physiological chemistry’ to c.1922] [1877]

1898 Pierre Curie (France) and Marie Sklodowska-Curie (Poland) discover radium [Ra] and polonium [Po] [Nobel Physics, 1903, Nobel Chem. 1911] — British Assoc. Meeting warns of imminent depletion of Chile saltpetre. [1830]

1900 Friedrich Dorn (Germany) discovers/fractionates final inert gas, Radon [Ra]. — Emil Fischer’s projection-formulae for sucrose and other sugars [Nobel 1902]. — F. A. V. Grignard (France) prepares organo-magnesium ‘Grignard reagents’ [Nobel Chem. 1912]

1901 First Nobel Prize for Chemistry, awarded to J. H. van’t Hoff for studies Stereochemistry. [see 1874]