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
Equation of state the pressure. In mathematical form, this can be stated as: The above relationship has also been attributed to Edme Mariotte and is sometimes referred to as Mariotte's law. However, Mariotte's work was not published until 1676. In 1787 the French physicist Jacques Charles found that oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and air expand to roughly the same extent over the same 80-kelvin interval. Later, in 1802, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac published results of similar experiments, indicating a linear relationship between volume and temperature: Dalton's Law of partial pressure states that the pressure of a mixture of gases is equal to the