![]() ![]() ![]() The "water controversy" has engaged historians of chemistry and partisans of the protagonists since the early 19 th century. Credit for the discovery has been given to or claimed on behalf of no less than four individuals: Henry Cavendish ( View portrait at the Edgar Fahs Smith collection, University of Pennsylvania.), Antoine Lavoisier, Gaspard Monge ( View portrait at Versailles.), and James Watt ( View portrait at the Edgar Fahs Smith collection, University of Pennsylvania.). The discovery that water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen (or, in the terminology of the day, of inflammable air and dephlogisticated air) was made in the early 1780s. And water is so common that its formation in many processes would be quite easy to overlook, especially if its formation was unanticipated or if other possible sources of moisture were present. After all, water is quite stable thermodynamically, and therefore rather difficult to decompose. It should not be surprising, then, that it was the last of the four to be shown not to be elementary. Of the four elements of the ancients, water is the only one which is a pure chemical substance, albeit a compound and not an element. Water is not an element: Lavoisier Elements and Atoms: Chapter 6 ![]()
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