Jons Jacob Berzelius
Jöns Jakob Berzelius (August 20, 1779 – August 7, 1848) was a Swedish chemist. He invented the modern chemical notation. Berzelius, John Dalton and Antoine Lavoisier are said to be the fathers of modern chemistry.
Berzelius was born in Linköping in Östergötland in Sweden. He studied at the school that is now known as Katedralskolan. After this, he studied at the Uppsala University to be a medical doctor. In 1802, he became a teacher. He became a professor in medicine and surgery at the Stockholm School of Surgery in 1807. In 1810, the school became a part of Medico-Chirurgiska Institutet - which later became the Karolinska Institute - and Berzelius became a professor in chemistry and pharmacy.
Not long after going to Stockholm, Berzelius wrote a chemistry textbook for his medical students. From this point, a long and productive career in chemistry began. While doing experiments in support of the textbook, he found the law of constant proportions. This law showed that inorganic compounds are made of different elements in proportion by weight. Based on this, in 1828, he created a table of relative atomic weights. On this table, oxygen was set to 100. The table had all of the elements known at the time. This work gave evidence of the atomic hypothesis that inorganic chemical compounds are made of atoms combined in whole number amounts. In learning that atomic weights are not integer multiples of hydrogen's, Berzelius also proved Prout's hypothesis wrong. Prout's hypothesis was that elements are built up from atoms of hydrogen.
In order to help his experiments, Berzelius created a system of chemical notation. In this notation, the elements were given simple written labels, for example, O for oxygen, or Fe for iron. The proportions of the elements was shown by numbers. This is the same basic system used today. The only difference is that instead of the subscript number used today (for example, H2O), Berzelius used a superscript.
Berzelius found the chemical elements silicon, selenium, thorium, and cerium. Students working in Berzelius laboratory also found lithium and vanadium.
Berzelius also had an effect on biology. He was the first person to show the difference between organic compounds (those made with carbon), and inorganic compounds. He helped Gerhardus Johannes Mulder in his elemental analyses of organic compounds such as coffee, tea and many proteins. The term "protein" itself was created by Berzelius, after Mulder noticed that all proteins seemed to have the same empirical formula and might be made of a single type of a (very large) molecule.
Berzelius wrote very often. He helped many leading scientists (such as Mulder, Claude Louis Berthollet, Humphry Davy, Friedrich Wöhler and Eilhard Mitscherlich), and many less-notable scientists.
Berzeliusskolan, a school located next to his alma matter Katedralskolan, is named for him.
