Historical background/story of discovery

    The historical roots of Bromine stretch back to the dawn civilization and a sea mussel, the straight-spined murex, or M.brandaris Linne. The murex secretes a liquid that was made into an expansive purple die  known as Tyrian purple. The fact that an organic compound of bromine was the key ingredient was not known until the early 1900s.

    In 1825, a freshman chemistry student at Heidelberg walked up to his professor and showed him a container of a red, chlorine-smelling liquid. These days, freshmen bring small refrigerators, portable TVs, teddy bears, and poor posture from home. Young Carl Löwig brought a new chemical element he had concocted at home during his summer break. His professor Leopold Gmelin didn't know what the smelly liquid was, but he knew it didn't belong to the world of common chemicals. Gmelin asked the student to prepare some more of the liquid so they could begin some thorough testing. Winter exams and the holidays interrupted the student's special project long enough to let another youthful chemist, Antoine-Jerome Balard, announce his results in a paper presented in the early 1826.

    Balard gets credit for discovering bromine and he, as is the custom, chose the name for the new element. Löwig and Balard both went on to distinguished careers in chemistry and teaching, but neither managed to discover another elment.

    Bromine was discovered at a time when anatical procedures were improving at a rapid pace. These improved techniques were actually responsible for the discovery of a great many elements because they allowed chemists to distinguish the various components of a substance more accurately. If your equipment and analytical techniques are only good to an accurately of 1%, for example, and the bromine content of chlorine sample is only 0.02%, then you aren't going to detect the presence of the bromine. The new and improved procedures,as exemplified by the discovery of bromine, made it possible to study many new substances that could not be detected before.