Which greenish-yellow gas was discovered by Humphry Davy in 1810?
Humphry Davy wished to avoid creating an equivocal term. The observations gathered from these experiments also led to Davy isolating boron in 1809. Chlorine was discovered in 1774 by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who called it ""dephlogisticated marine acid"" (see phlogiston theory) and mistakenly thought it contained oxygen. Davy showed that the acid of Scheele's substance, called at the time oxymuriatic acid, contained no oxygen. This discovery overturned Lavoisier's definition of acids as compounds of oxygen. In 1810, chlorine was given its current name by Humphry Davy, who insisted that chlorine was in fact an element. The name chlorine, chosen by
Humphry Davy hydrogen that could be partly or totally replaced by reactive metals which are placed above hydrogen in the reactivity series. When acids reacted with metals they formed salts and hydrogen gas. Bases were substances that reacted with acids to form salts and water. These definitions worked well for most of the nineteenth century. Humphry Davy experimented on fragments of the Herculaneum papyri before his departure to Naples in 1818. His early experiments showed hope of success. In his report to the Royal Society Davy writes that: 'When a fragment of a brown MS. in which the layers were strongly adhered,