Your Chemical World” In today’s world we rely on many different facets to achieve what we normally don’t even give a second thought. As I am sitting here typing this paper I am simultaneously using the culmination of numerous chemical breakthroughs. The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a group of over 150, 000 chemists, both academic and industrial. “Your Chemical World,” a book that the ACS has published, is a biography of sorts, where in the uses and need for a chemical world are shown in an easy-to-understand way. Although chemistry would seem to be just a recently invented and used scientific field, chemistry has been an integral part of our lives for a long time.
Our early ancestors, unable to even write, figured out that certain substances could be used for painting, hence the archaic cave paintings found in Southern Europe. Today we use chemistry to build our houses, to drive to work everyday, even toasting your toast in the morning. Because chemistry is our link to the hidden world of the earth’s terrestrial fruits like Silicon or Iron our hands will be forever bound to chemistry. The book starts off with our beginning and the unlikely usage of chemistry in pre-historic times. Our ancestors were more then likely concerned primarily with staying alive. Certain things are needed to do that, like food, shelter, energy, and drink.
Once those needs were meet our Neanderthal brethren made some archaically beautiful cave paintings. In doing so they applied chemistry in a whole new way, to benefit their lives. In time chemistry became an integral part of society, today we have used it to stretch our lives out by more then forty percent of what it would have been in the start of the century by the use of medicine. Later on in recordable history chemistry was implemented through rusty trial and error methods which allowed many things to be created such as Bronze in 3600 BC or glass in 2500 BC. But it wasn’t until the age of Greek philosophers that the question of these materials components, or made them exist. After many theories by many different people a man named Leucippus came up with the idea that all things were made up of indivisible, small particles.
Although we now know that that was the correct theory the age of alchemy started and didn’t slow down until after medieval times. The next remarkable step was taken by Robert Boyle a British chemist who defined and coined the term “elements” as “pure substance, which resists all ordinary attempts at decomposition.” His assistant Robert Hooke also made some profound movements; he invented the first compound microscope. Using it he also was able to look at and theorize the idea of “cells.” Although Boyle did define elements the credit of being the father of chemistry is given to Dmitri Mendeleev, who not only formulated the periodic law but also created the periodic table of elements. Sir Joesph John Thomson then proposed the idea of protons in atoms, followed by Sir Ernest Rutherford’s Nuclear theory with an atom proton. Eventually all the elements that we have today were discovered and put into place on the periodic table giving us today’s modern chemistry.
In the beginning of this century a very small enterprising community had begun commercial chemical operations. The chemical world slowly picked up speed and eventually blossomed into what it is today. The book then begins to relate all this documented history to our own world. By showing the uses of the chemistry industry in products we rely on every day it is clearly showed the importance of it. In every aspect of your house we can find evidence of chemistry. In the Vinyl siding to the roof shingles to the power that runs the very computer that I am writing this on.
If peel back the skin further we can see that in every room there is also blatant hints toward chemistry’s uses in our house. In the kitchen we keep we see it in our refrigerator, in the family room the TV we religiously watch. In the Bathroom we can see it by staring in to the toilet, yes the toilet, just picture the miles and miles of sewers winding deep underneath the ground you walk on. In our garage we can see it by looking under the hood of your car, chemistry is everywhere. So “Your Chemical World” has now demonstrated the inviolability of it’s products, the next logical question one may ask is where did the raw materials that were used to make things like my car or refrigerator? Well the answer to that is you are standing on it. Earth.
The terrestrial bosom that we sprouted from also kicked out some things to help us. Through the combination of earth, water, air, and plant and animal matter many new things were created far beneath the reaches of man. We dig petroleum out of the earth and turn it into rubber, gas for or car. We get coal from compressed animal and plant matter and then use it for energy.
We dig up numerous others too like silicon or sulfur. The point is though that everything we have we fashioned from the raw earth. Because this book was written on the foundations of scientific research it brings about its points in a very logical and systematic all order. After conducting the history of chemistry, then how we use it, then where we get it from, a next step would probably lead us to who does it. The chemical industry is one of the largest, most complex array of products and people. From paper production to iron ore strip mining the chemical world encompasses it all.
But the primary purpose of the chemistry is what it has always been, the pursuit of knowledge. The consumer products that come as a result are just beneficial and lucky offspring of one giant academic birth mother known as chemistry. Approximately two-thirds of this mammoth industry are those that refine produce or manufacture petrochemicals in some way. Petrochemicals are used to produce eight different hydrocarbons, which are then used to create an amazing amount of organic compounds from plastics to. There are also a lot of production plants that use inorganic chemicals to produce an equally large amount of materials. After these production plant a much larger network of plants know as chemical process industries.
They use the products made by the chemical industry to manufacture the goods we use everyday. These two industries are combined to account for a third of the national domestic gross product. Tow of the largest producers of these chemicals and products are E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. or du Pont and Dow chemical Co.
In just on year these two chemical made thirty-seven billion and eighteen billion dollars respectively. Over the course of about 150 years the chemical industry grew to quite remarkable proportions. When World War One hit the chemical industry had become very important to the opposing sides. With out it we would have seen little or no advance in the way we do battle. Rifles slowly became more accurate and deadly. Bombs did the same.
But it was not until after the war that the consumers got to truly enjoy the benefits of wartime research. New synthetic copies of original products hit the market taking over the previous by being more reliable and cost effective. All these new products and the ones that are currently being developed right now are a result of R&D or research and development. With out it companies would have nearly no new products to market making the success in today’s global economy seem very dismal. R&D is the driving force behind the chemical industry. It is the reason America exported sixteen billion dollars more then it imported.
These are the companies that make the goods you use and are the reason for our success in living. Now that we know who is making these fascinating gadgets that can intrigue and perplex simultaneously, it is time to know what they are really made of. As previously mentioned in “Your chemical World,” the finding of what we now call the periodic table took quite some time. Starting with the one proposed theory of things being made up of indivisible small particles, we are led down a very rocky path. This path was severely distorted by medieval time’s alchemy.
But eventually we.