OXYGEN

Home

References

General Terms

Base Site
(All Atoms)

History

Joseph Priestley of England and Carl Wilhelm Scheele of Sweden both separately recognized oxygen as a distinct element in 1774. They each came across oxygen while heating mercuric oxide, or HgO. Though Priestley referred to the gas as “dephlagisticated air” and Scheele referred to it as “fire air,” neither of these names stuck. Under the false belief that the gas was necessary to form acid, a man named Antoine Lavoisier named the gas oxygen, meaning “acid forming.”

Joseph Priestley (left), Carl Wilhelm Scheele (right)

Before the atomic mass of carbon 12 was adopted by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry as a standard mass comparison for the elements, the atomic mass of oxygen was used.