From alchemy to the periodic table to the synthesis of everything.
8 topics · 7 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Pierre Curie, with Autobiographical Notes by Marie Curie
Marie Curie · 1923
Recounts Pierre Curie's work on piezoelectricity, magnetism and radioactivity alongside Marie Curie's own account of their scientific partnership and…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Sceptical Chymist
Robert Boyle · 1661
Attacks the Aristotelian four-element and Paracelsian three-principle theories of matter, demanding that any claimed chemical element actually be…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Elements of Chemistry
Antoine Lavoisier · 1789
Redefines a chemical element as a substance that cannot be decomposed further, replaces phlogiston with oxygen as the agent of combustion, and treats…
+2 more at this level
7 works
Marie Curie
Recounts Pierre Curie's work on piezoelectricity, magnetism and radioactivity alongside Marie Curie's own account of their scientific partnership and the isolation of radium.
about 3.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Boyle
Attacks the Aristotelian four-element and Paracelsian three-principle theories of matter, demanding that any claimed chemical element actually be isolated from compounds rather than merely asserted.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026William Ramsay
Recounts isolating argon, helium, neon, krypton and xenon from air, a family of elements chemically inert enough that their existence had gone undetected.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Leo H. Baekeland
Announces a resin built entirely from phenol and formaldehyde with no natural precursor, arguing that a synthetic material can be engineered for properties no natural substance offers rather than merely imitating one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Antoine Lavoisier
Redefines a chemical element as a substance that cannot be decomposed further, replaces phlogiston with oxygen as the agent of combustion, and treats conservation of mass as chemistry's basic law.
about 7.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Dmitri Mendeleev
Argues that arranging the elements by atomic weight into a periodic table let him predict the existence and properties of then-undiscovered elements before they were found.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Fritz Haber
Reports fixing atmospheric nitrogen as ammonia directly from nitrogen and hydrogen gas under high pressure over an iron catalyst, the reaction later scaled to industrial output by Carl Bosch.
link checked 17 Sept 2026