The Man Behind the Number Deb Collins

Amedeo Avogadro was born in Turin which is about 60 miles southwest of Milan in what is now Italy. He was born to Count Filippo Avogadro and Anna Maria Vercellone, and had four brothers. Count Avogadro was a distinguished lawyer and civil servant who came from a prominent family in the region that had produced many generations of Italian military and civil administrative leaders. The name Avogadro is derived from the Italian word avvocato (barrister). As a young child, Avogadro received his first education at home from the local priests; he later attended secondary schools in Turin. Between 1792 and 1796 he studied law at the University of Turin to follow his father in a legal career. For a few years after graduating from law school, he held several government positions. Around 1800 he began to show an interest in natural philosophy, undertook private study of physics and mathematics, and attended physics lectures at the University of Turn. His interest in science seems was stimulated by the recent research on electricity by fellow Italian, Alessandro Volta. After 1806, Avogadro abandoned his interest in a legal career to concentrate on science and began working on electricity experiments. He was soon appointed as a demonstrator at the Academy of Turin. In 1809, he became professor of natural philosophy at the Royal College of Vercelli. Within one decade, Avogadro was elected as a full member of the Turin Academy of Sciences and one year later was appointed to the first Italian chair of mathematical physics at Turin. His salary was six hundred lire per year which would be approximately 42 cents in US dollars.

Avogadro was a prolific writer and published articles in many areas of the physical sciences. His name appears in many modern chemistry and physics textbooks, although he has often been misrepresented as being a chemist because his work had a profound influence on the development of chemical theories. His name is usually associated with two important aspects of chemistry: Avogadros law, which describes the relationship between the volume and number of particles of a gas, and the Avogadro number, which represents the number of particles in one mole of a substance. The concept of the mole as a unit for the measurement of atomic particles was unknown in Avogadros time, and the term was not introduced until the twentieth century. In many ways it is amazing that Avogadro had a successful scientific career. He received no formal training in science and made a dramatic career change when he was thirty years old. The former was not particularly unusual in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as some of the greatest scientists of the period were self-educated. Others had received their early training in a related field such as pharmacy or medicine before concentrating on a career in the physical sciences. It was very surprising that Avogadro made the transition from law to science so effortlessly, and it showed that he had a good mind and dedicated spirit of discovery. However, Avogadro was not a good experimentalist and had a poor reputation as such among his colleagues. He preferred to interpret the experimental results of others using a mathematical approach. Much of his work was translated and published, but it generally appeared in obscure journals. In addition, Turin was geographically isolated from the world centers of scientific research, which were considered to be in Germany and France. Finally Avogadro was, by nature, modest and reserved, and he never actively sought fame. He never traveled to other countries and

rarely corresponded or met with other scientists outside his region. It was not until after his death that the world really comprehended and recognized his contributions to science. During the early nineteenth century, chemists began serious attempts to understand the nature of matter and chemical reactions. John Dalton measured the mass ratios of elements in compounds and found these ratios to always be simple whole numbers. For the first time, he demonstrated that the elements must exist as discrete units, or atoms. The nature of one particular form of matter, gases, had always been difficult for early scientists to understand. In 1808, Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac published studies on the combining volumes of gases. He showed that gases always combined in simple whole number ratios. For example, 200 cubic centimeters of hydrogen always combined with 100 cubic centimeters of oxygen to form 200 cubic centimeters of water vapor (a 2:1:2 ratio). Although such observations suggested that equal volumes of gases contained equal numbers of atoms, Dalton rejected this hypothesis, believing that Gay-Lussacs experiments were inaccurate. Dalton and others argued that one volume of oxygen gas contained a specific number of oxygen atoms and therefore must produce the same volume of water vapor with an equivalent number of water atoms. It should be remembered that at the time, it was still generally believed that water had a chemical formula of HO and was composed of HO atoms. Like Dalton, most chemists of the day believed that common gaseous elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and chlorine existed as individual atoms. Avogadros explanation appeared in his 1811 article Essai dune manire de dterminer les masses relatives des molcules lmentaires des corps et les proportions selon lesquelles elles entrent dans ces combinaisons (essay on a manner of determining the relative masses of the elementary molecules of bodies and the proportions in which they enter into combinations), in which he attempted to

explain the inconsistencies with existing theories by assuming that equal volumes of all gases contained equal numbers of molecules rather than atoms, provided conditions of temperature and pressure were kept constant. Avogadros hypothesis (also known as the molecular hypothesis) would later become known as Avogadros law. During a chemical reaction, therefore, Avogadro proposed that molecules could split into half-molecules (atoms) and combine with other halfmolecules to form the observed product compounds. By contrast, Dalton viewed the combination of two gases such as hydrogen and oxygen as involving individual atoms. It is now known, thanks to Avogadros insight, that this reaction involves molecules that are composed of two atoms each (diatomic molecules), which is consistent with Gay-Lussacs experimental results on combining volumes in which two volumes of hydrogen react with one volume of oxygen to generate two volumes of water vapor. According to Avogadro, each molecule of water must contain one molecule of hydrogen (H2) and one half-molecule of oxygen (one O atom). It followed from this that the correct chemical formula for water was H2O and not HO as Dalton and others believed. It should be noted that Avogadro never used the modern system of chemical formulas that are shown in the previous equations. If he had, his theory may have been more understandable and therefore readily accepted sooner. Avogadros hypothesis also explained discrepancies in the measured densities of gases and resulted in more accurate determinations of atomic weights. Water vapor was known to have a lower density than oxygen, but this fact was difficult to explain if the latter existed as single atoms. The occurrence of diatomic oxygen molecules easily explained why oxygen had a greater density than water vapor. In Daltons early table of atomic weights, which were a measurement of the relative weights of atoms, hydrogen was assigned a value of one and oxygen a value of

7.5. When viewed as diatomic molecules, the value of hydrogen became 2 and oxygen 15. In other words, Daltons atomic weights had to be doubled for diatomic molecules. This eventually led to a more accurate table of atomic weights. Avogadros molecular hypothesis was largely ignored during his lifetime. His theory did have the support of a fellow Italian chemist, Stanislao Cannizzaro, who was one of the few who seemed to grasp the significance of Avogadros idea, but only after Avogadros death. Most scientists, however, failed to distinguish between atoms and molecules, and Avogadro, isolated in Turin and largely unknown in Europe, never witnessed the universal acceptance of his theory. Cannizzaro showed that Avogadros theory could be used for determining molecular size and accurate chemical formulas. His enthusiasm for the molecular hypothesis had a profound influence on the German chemist Lothar Meyer. In his 1864 textbook, Meyer employed Avogadros hypothesis to develop his ideas on theoretical chemistry. This book had considerable influence on other chemists, who applied Avogadros ideas to many other aspects of physical chemistry. Avogadro held his position as the chair of mathematical physics at Turin from 1820 until 1822, when it was abolished because of regional political turmoil. The position was reestablished in 1832, and Avogadro was reappointed in 1834. He held this post until his retirement in 1850 at the age of seventy-four. He spent the last six years of his life continuing with his scientific studies and died in Turin on July 9, 1856. It was not until around 1870 that the term Avogadros law first appeared in print; by the 1880s it had received universal recognition. The realization that common elemental gases existed as diatomic units had an enormous influence on obliterating chemical inconsistencies and linking the chemical and physical properties of substances. Accurate density determinations and

atomic and molecular weight measurements for gases also became possible, which aided the rapidly developing area of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century. Once Avogadros law was understood, a new era in the development of chemical theories and molecular composition became possible. The Dutch chemist Jacobus vant Hoff showed that Avogadros law could be applied to solutions as well as gases, for which he was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901. For chemists, a significant consequence of Avogadros law was the realization that one mole of all substances (that is, the atomic or molecular weight of a substance expressed in grams) contains the same number of particles. This quantity, equal to 6.02252 1023, is now known as the Avogadro number in honor of a great scientist who was not recognized in his own lifetime.

References Amedeo Avogadro. Retrieved March 28, 2014 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro. Fisher, Nicholas. Avogadros Hypothesis: Why Did the Chemists Ignore It? Parts 1 and 2. History of Science 20, nos. 2 and 3 (1982): 77-102, 212-231. Guareschi, Icilio (1911), "Amedeo Avogadro e la sua opera scientifica", Opere scelte di Amedeo Avogadro, Turin: Accademia delle scienze, pp. icxl. Ihde, Aaron J. The Development of Modern Chemistry. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.