Chlorine name "halogen", meaning "salt producer", was originally used for chlorine in 1811 by Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger. This term was later used as a generic term to describe all the elements in the chlorine family (fluorine, bromine, iodine), after a suggestion by Jöns Jakob Berzelius in 1826. In 1823, Michael Faraday liquefied chlorine for the first time, and demonstrated that what was then known as "solid chlorine" had a structure of chlorine hydrate (Cl·HO). Chlorine gas was first used by French chemist Claude Berthollet to bleach textiles in 1785. Modern bleaches resulted from further work by Berthollet, who first produced
Bromine bromine at −195 °C is pale yellow. Like solid chlorine and iodine, solid bromine crystallises in the orthorhombic crystal system, in a layered lattice of Br molecules. The Br–Br distance is 227 pm (close to the gaseous Br–Br distance of 228 pm) and the Br···Br distance between molecules is 331 pm within a layer and 399 pm between layers (compare the van der Waals radius of bromine, 195 pm). This structure means that bromine is a very poor conductor of electricity, with a conductivity of around 5 × 10 Ω cm just below the melting point, although this is better