Good day class today I will be discussing the brief history of acid and base chemistry. In
ancient Greece they initially started categorizing acids and baces through the taste of
the substance itself, so substances that were sour were marked as acids while those
that were bitter were categorized as bases. French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
during late 1700s developed the idea that acids are not unique and that they all share a
commonality between them. Lavoisier believed this commonality was oxygen atoms. By
the early 1800s English chemist Humphry Davy proved that oxygen was not the
commonality that acids shared. He discovered this by finding acids that did not contain
oxygen in them. Decades after this discovery a German chemist by the name Justus
von Liebig proposed that the commonality between acids was hydrogen.
In the 1890s Svante August Arrhenius posed that acids release hydrogen cations into
the solution which made it acidic. Similarly he posed that bases released hydroxyl
anions. He built on these concepts with neutralization. During neutralization the
hydrogen cations bond with the hydroxyl anions to create water the remaining ions
would bond to create the appropriate salt.
Brønsted and Lowry independently posed that acids did release protons, but bases
were defined as a compound that could accept the proton.
Modern day considerations of acids and bases are based up Brønsted and Lowry, and
Arrhenius’ idea of what acids and bases are.