REPORT: A Short History of Chemistry by J. R.

Partington
The first metal known was probably gold. Was a step above the use of stone, bone, or horn.
Alluvial deposits were washed, and small nuggets were obtained. This was probably the
earliest method of harvesting gold from river sands. Next metal might have been copper
from as early as 3500 B.C.E. Egyptians might have known about copper before gold, and
most likely obtained it from the peninsula of Sinai. Probably obtained by ore malachite.
Egypt and Mesopotamia are both candidates for being the source of metallurgy. The
Sumerians in Mesopotamia were experts of metallurgy, especially gold, copper, and silver.
Introduction of iron in classical Greece. Iron was brought in to the region by a new group of
people. Then came the invention of bronze. Bronze is an alloy of tin and copper. Tin is not
found in many regions, and so the true source of the Ancient Egyptians tin is unclear. Some
say they got their tin from the same region as the Phoenicians, the English Coast of
Cornwall. Another, more likely theory is that the tin was transported from mines in Drangiana
in Persia. Today, there is no more tin in this area, and there have been no records of the
existence of tin here for a long while. A few thousand years ago, however, this might have
been a different case. Sometimes, instead of tin, certain Egyptian and Mesopotamian
bronzes contained lead, or even antimony. Before King Menes (c. 3400 BCE), Egypt was
familiar with copper, gold, iron, silver, and lead. Sometimes, the earliest iron from Sumerian
Mesopotamia or Egypt contains some nickel, hinting to meteorites being the source for
much of this iron. Later iron did not contain nickel, such as in the pyramid of Cheops (c.
2900 BCE). Iron seemed to come from the Hittites around the Black Sea, who were skilled in
iron production. Cyprus grew to become proficient in the brass industry, and zinc from c. 500
BCE was discovered in the Island of Rhodes.
While the Egyptians and Mesopotamian inhabitants were busy with metallurgy, they also
began to perfect the arts of glazed pottery and glass. The wheel was used to mold potting
clay, which was then baked in closed furnaces rather than open fires. Glazes containing
copper compounds were used early on in Ancient Egypt, which gave opaque blue to green
glazes. Blue glass was sometimes colored with cobalt as well. Nearly clear, colorless glass
was made early on as well.
Indigo was produced from the indigo plant by the Egyptians. Purple of Tyre was first
extracted by the Phoenicians from marine mollusks. Early dyeing techniques consisted of
the use of mordants, [which comes from the French mordre, to bite], which were special
compounds that aid in fixing the dye to the fabric.
The very first ideas of elements- although they werent named as such until some decades
later- were those of water, fire, air, and earth by Greek philosophers. Water, air, and then fire
were separately pondered by three individual philosophers before Empedokles suggested
the idea of four basic roots of matter (elements), which were bound and broken by forces of
attraction and repulsion. Plato was the one to use the term elements, who also assumed
that the most basic particle of each element was unique by its shape (water was assumed to
be shaped like an icosahedron, fire as a tetrahedron, air as an octahedron, and earth as a
cube). Different materials were said to be formed by specific mixtures and ratios of each of
the four elements. For example, Aristotle thought that metals were formed mostly of water.
Aristotle pondered and created the fundamental properties of the four elements that were
based on whether the element was hot, cold, wet, or dry. Later writings spoke of a
fifth element, which corresponded to ether. Aristotle differentiated mixtures and solutions
and described the irreversibility of a chemical change due to its change on properties.
Aristotle was also aware of a basic form of distillation where he noted that water vapor
collected from sea water was purified. The theory of the four elements was accepted up until
about the 1700s, and the fifth element, ether, was accepted as a medium for the
transmission of light as recently as the late 1800s.
REFLECTION. While the latter half of the book was not relevant to my capstone topic,
the first have proved to contain invaluable information. While I studied the entirety of the
chapter, the report that I typed up only summarizes the first couple of sections. There is
about an hour and a half worth of reading that I did not type up and include in this report.
Including this time spent reading as well as the report outlined above, I spent about three
hours studying this subtopic.