Hydrogen
Hydrogen
History Yull Brown: Henry Cavendish (1766) was the first to recognize that hydrogen gas was a discrete substance, and that it produces water when burned, the property for which it was later named. Henry Cavendish was a British natural philosopher, scientist, and an important experimental and theoretical chemist and physicist. Cavendish is noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called “inflammable air”. He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper “On Factitious Airs”.
Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish’s experiment and gave the element its name.
In Greek, hydrogen means “water-former”.
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was a French nobleman and chemist central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology. He is widely considered in popular literature as the “father of modern chemistry”. This label, however, is more a product of Lavoisier’s eminent skill as a self-promoter and underplays his dependence on the instruments, experiments, and ideas of other chemists.
Industrial production of hydrogen is mainly from steam reforming natural gas. Most hydrogen is used near the site of its production site, the two largest uses being fossil fuel processing (like in hydrocracking) and ammonia production, mostly for the fertilizer market.
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