Chemistry: A Volatile History Chemistry: A Volatile History Chemistry: A Volatile History is a 2010 BBC documentary on the history of chemistry presented by Jim Al-Khalili. It was nominated for the 2010 British Academy Television Awards in the category Specialist Factual. Only in the last 200 years have we known what an element is – a substance that cannot be broken down further by chemical reaction. The Ancient Greeks, with no way of breaking open substances, could only base their ideas of the elements on what they could see: Earth, Fire, Water and Air. In the 16th century alchemists were busy trying to turn
Amount of substance especially the early metallurgists, probably had some notion of amount of substance, but there are no surviving records of any generalization of the idea beyond a set of recipes. In 1758, Mikhail Lomonosov questioned the idea that mass was the only measure of the quantity of matter, but he did so only in relation to his theories on gravitation. The development of the concept of amount of substance was coincidental with, and vital to, the birth of modern chemistry. Amount of substance Amount of substance is a standard-defined quantity that measures the size of an ensemble of particles, such as