Stanislao Cannizzaro in Italy. He is best known for his contribution to the then-existing debate over atoms, molecules, and atomic weights. He championed Amedeo Avogadro's notion that equal volumes of gas at the same pressure and temperature held equal numbers of molecules or atoms, and the notion that equal volumes of gas could be used to calculate atomic weights. In so doing, Cannizzaro provided a new understanding of chemistry. Stanislao Cannizzaro Stanislao Cannizzaro FRS (13 July 1826 – 10 May 1910) was an Italian chemist. He is remembered today largely for the Cannizzaro reaction and for his influential role in the atomic-weight
Graham's law other studies of gas behaviour provided a basis for later theoretical work by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell to explain the properties of gases as collections of small particles moving through largely empty space. Perhaps the greatest success of the kinetic theory of gases, as it came to be called, was the discovery that for gases, the temperature as measured on the Kelvin (absolute) temperature scale is directly proportional to the average kinetic energy of the gas molecules. Graham's law for diffusion could thus be understood as a consequence of the molecular kinetic energies being equal at the same temperature.