History of chemistry 1808, certain of his central ideas were soon adopted by most chemists. However, uncertainty persisted for half a century about how atomic theory was to be configured and applied to concrete situations; chemists in different countries developed several different incompatible atomistic systems. A paper that suggested a way out of this difficult situation was published as early as 1811 by the Italian physicist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856), who hypothesized that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules, from which it followed that relative molecular weights of any two gases are the same as
History of molecular theory Determining the Relative Masses of the Elementary Molecules of Bodies", he essentially states, i.e. according to Partington's "A Short History of Chemistry", that: Note that this quote is not a literal translation. Avogadro uses the name "molecule" for both atoms and molecules. Specifically, he uses the name "elementary molecule" when referring to atoms and to complicate the matter also speaks of "compound molecules" and "composite molecules". During his stay in Vercelli, Avogadro wrote a concise note ("memoria") in which he declared the hypothesis of what we now call Avogadro's law: "equal volumes of gases, at the same temperature and pressure,