Berzelius, Jöns Jacob

▪ Swedish chemist

Introduction

born August 20, 1779, near Linköping, Sweden

died August 7, 1848, Stockholm

 one of the founders of modern chemistry. He is especially noted for his determination of atomic weights (atomic weight), the development of modern chemical symbols (chemical symbol), his electrochemical theory (electrochemical reaction), the discovery and isolation of several elements, the development of classical analytical techniques, and his investigation of isomerism and catalysis, phenomena that owe their names to him. He was a strict empiricist and insisted that any new theory be consistent with the sum of chemical knowledge.

Education and career

      Berzelius studied medicine at Uppsala University from 1796 to 1802, and from 1807 to 1832 he served as a professor of medicine and pharmacy at the Karolinska Institute. He became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1808, serving from 1818 as its principal functionary, the perpetual secretary. In recognition of his growing international reputation, Berzelius was elevated to a position of nobility in 1818 on the coronation of King Charles XIV John. He was awarded a baronetcy in 1835 upon his marriage to Elizabeth Poppius. Together they had no children.

      Berzelius was an early Swedish supporter of the new chemistry proposed a generation earlier by the renowned French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent), and he remained a forceful exponent of enlightenment science and progressive politics even as romanticism pervaded Sweden and Europe. After initially aspiring to a career in physiological, especially animal, chemistry, he shifted his interests toward inorganic chemistry, the field in which he made his chief contributions. He eventually devoted considerable time to organic chemistry as well.

Electrochemical dualism

      Berzelius is best known for his system of electrochemical dualism. The electrical battery, invented in 1800 by Alessandro Volta (Volta, Conte Alessandro) and known as the voltaic pile, provided the first experimental source of current electricity. In 1803 Berzelius demonstrated, as did the English chemist Humphry Davy (Davy, Sir Humphry, Baronet) at a slightly later date, the power of the voltaic pile to decompose chemicals into pairs of electrically opposite constituents. For example, water decomposed into electropositive hydrogen and electronegative oxygen, whereas salts degraded into electronegative acids and electropositive bases. Based upon this evidence, Berzelius revised and generalized the acid/base chemistry chiefly promoted by Lavoisier. For Berzelius, all chemical compounds contained two electrically opposing constituents, the acidic, or electronegative, and the basic, or electropositive. His generalization elevated bases from their formerly passive role as mere substrates upon which acids reacted to form salts to substances having characteristic properties opposite those of acids. He also generalized about the electrochemical dualism of other substances including unusual inorganic compounds such as the chlorides of sulfur, double and higher salts, naturally occurring minerals, and organic compounds. According to Berzelius, all chemicals, whether natural or artificial, mineral or organic, could be distinguished and specified qualitatively by identifying their electrically opposing constituents.

stoichiometry

      In addition to his qualitative specification of chemicals, Berzelius investigated their quantitative relationships as well. As early as 1806, he began to prepare an up-to-date Swedish chemistry textbook and read widely on the subject of chemical combination (chemical compound). Finding little information on the subject, he decided to undertake further investigations. His pedagogical interest focused his attention upon inorganic chemistry. Around 1808 he launched what became a vast and enduring program in the laboratory analysis of inorganic matter. To this end, he created most of his apparatuses and prepared his own reagents. Through precise experimental trials, supported by extraordinary interpretive acumen, he established the atomic weights (atomic weight) of the elements, the formulas of their oxides, sulfides, and salts, and the formulas of virtually all known inorganic compounds, many of which he was the first to prepare or characterize.

      Berzelius's experiments led to a more complete depiction of the principles of chemical combining proportions, an area of investigation that the German chemist Jeremias Benjamin Richter named “ stoichiometry” in 1792. Richter, the French chemist Joseph-Louis Proust (Proust, Joseph-Louis), and the English chemist John Dalton (Dalton, John), despite their theoretical insights, had contributed little empirical evidence toward elucidating the principles of chemical combination. By showing how compounds conformed to the laws of constant, multiple, and equivalent proportions as well as to a series of semiempirical rules devised to cover specific classes of compounds, Berzelius established the quantitative specificity by which substances combined. These results, when viewed alongside his qualitative identification of electrically opposing constituents, allowed Berzelius to specify more completely the combining properties of all known chemicals. He reported his analytical results in a series of famous publications, most prominently his Essai sur la théorie des proportions chimiques et sur l'influence chimique de l'électricité (1819; “Essay on the Theory of Chemical Proportions and on the Chemical Influence of Electricity”), and the atomic weight tables that appeared in the 1826 German translation of his Lärbok i kemien (Textbook of Chemistry). He continued his analytical work until 1844, reporting in specialized articles and new editions of his textbook both new results, such as his extensive analysis of the compounds of the platinum metals in 1827–28, together with refinements of his earlier experimental findings.

atomism and nomenclature

      The project of specifying substances had several important consequences. In order to establish and display the laws of stoichiometry, Berzelius invented and perfected more exacting standards and techniques of analysis. His generalization of the older acid/base chemistry led him to extend chemical nomenclature that Lavoisier had introduced to cover the bases (mostly metallic oxides), a change that allowed Berzelius to name any compound consistently with Lavoisier's chemistry. For this purpose, he bypassed the French names that Lavoisier and his colleagues had devised as well as their translations into Swedish introduced by Berzelius's colleagues at Uppsala, Pehr Afzelius and Anders Gustav Ekeberg (Ekeberg, Anders Gustav). Instead, Berzelius created a Latin template for translation into diverse vernacular languages.

      The project of specifying substances also led Berzelius to develop a new system of notation that could portray the composition of any compound both qualitatively (by showing its electrochemically opposing ingredients) and quantitatively (by showing the proportions in which the ingredients were united). His system abbreviated the Latin names of the elements with one or two letters and applied superscripts to designate the number of atoms of each element present in both the acidic and basic ingredient. In his own work, however, Berzelius preferred to indicate the proportions of oxygen with dots placed over the letters of the oxidized elements, but most chemists rejected that practice. Instead, they followed Berzelius's younger German colleagues, who replaced his superscripts with subscripts and thus created the system still used today. Berzelius's new nomenclature and notation were prominently displayed in his 1819 Essai, which presented a coherent, compelling system of chemical theory backed by a vast body of analytical results that rested on improved, highly precise laboratory methods.

mineralogy

      Berzelius applied his analytical method to two primary areas, mineralogy and organic chemistry. Both of these areas needed better ways to specify and discriminate between substances. Cultivated in Sweden for its industrial utility, mineralogy had long stimulated Berzelius's analytical interest. Berzelius himself discovered several new elements, including cerium (1803) and thorium (1828), in samples of naturally occurring minerals, and his students discovered lithium, vanadium, lanthanum, didymium (later resolved into praseodymium and neodymium), erbium (later resolved into erbium, ytterbium, scandium, holmium, and thulium), and terbium. Berzelius also discovered selenium (1818), though this element was isolated in the mud resulting from the manufacture of sulfuric acid rather than from a mineral sample. Berzelius's interest in mineralogy also fostered his analysis and preparation of new compounds of these and other elements.

      Native minerals, however, were more complex in their makeup than laboratory chemicals, and therefore they were more difficult to characterize. Previous Swedish mineralogists had considered mineral species to be chemical compounds, but they had become frustrated in their attempts to discriminate one compound from another and from other mixtures. In 1813 Berzelius received a mineral collection from a visiting British physician, William MacMichael, that prompted him to take up the analysis and classification of minerals. His major contribution, reported in 1814, was recognizing that silica, formerly seen as a base, frequently served as the electronegative or acidic constituent of minerals and that the traditional mineralogical class of “earths” could be reduced primarily to silicate salts. Distinguishing mineral species therefore demanded a knowledge of the stoichiometry of complex silicates, a conviction that led Berzelius in 1815 to develop his dualistic doctrine, which now anticipated a dualistic structure for substances formerly seen as “triple salts” and for other complex minerals.

      Many remaining problems in the specification of minerals were resolved by the law of isomorphism, the recognition that chemically similar substances possess similar crystal forms, discovered in 1818 by the German chemist Eilhardt Mitscherlich (Mitscherlich, Eilhardt). Berzelius had provided both the patronage and the foundational concepts for Mitscherlich's own career. In contemporary mineralogy disputes, Berzelius frequently sided with René-Just Haüy (Haüy, René-Just), who based his crystallography on the existence of distinct compounds as interpreted through Lavoisier's chemistry, and against the school of Abraham Gottlob Werner (Werner, Abraham Gottlob), who relied on external characters such as colour, texture, and hardness to discriminate between species of minerals. Without completely subordinating mineralogy to chemistry, Berzelius transformed the field and established a flourishing tradition of chemical mineralogy.

Organic chemistry

      Organic chemistry also posed problems in the discrimination between substances. Berzelius originally devoted his career to physiological chemistry, a field based upon the application of chemistry and physiology to substances derived from animals and plants. To that end, he mastered traditional extractive analysis and published papers on these analyses between 1806 and 1808 that became highly regarded by his peers. However, he found that extractive analysis provided no fundamental insight into organic matter, since its products were not distinct substances but rather mixtures of broadly similar compounds. Meanwhile, his interest in organic composition was overshadowed by his forays into mineral chemistry. Only around 1814, after considerable investigation into inorganic chemistry, did he again turn his attention to organic analysis. At this point, he isolated stoichiometric compounds and worked to determine their elemental constituents. Berzelius argued that, despite differences between organic and inorganic matter, organic compounds could be assigned a dualistic composition and therefore could be specified in the same manner as inorganic ones. He improved analytical methods and, together with younger colleagues from France and Germany, fostered the advance of organic chemistry by interpreting compounds and their reactions dualistically. The application of his precept that organic chemistry could be understood in terms of the principles that govern inorganic chemistry reached its zenith in the 1830s, especially as it was embodied in the older theory of radicals. However, it was also at this time that younger chemists, including Jean-Baptiste-André Dumas (Dumas, Jean-Baptiste-André) and Auguste Laurent (Laurent, Auguste), discovered phenomena such as chlorine substitution and began to recast inorganic chemistry in the light of organic substances. Berzelius's strong resistance to this move tarnished his reputation at the close of his career and fostered pejorative assessments of his work that historians have only recently shown to be exaggerated and misleading.

A man of influence

      Berzelius had a profound influence on chemistry, stemming in part from his substantial achievements and in part from his ability to enhance and project his authority. Throughout his life he cultivated professional relationships in diverse ways. He trained both Swedish students, including Nils Gabriel Sefström and Carl Gustaf Mosander (Mosander, Carl Gustaf), and foreign students including Heinrich Rose, Gustav Rose, and Friedrich Wöhler (Wöhler, Friedrich). He also aided the careers of protégés such as Mitscherlich. Berzelius visited foreign colleagues, meeting Davy and William Hyde Wollaston (Wollaston, William Hyde) in London in 1812 and Claude-Louis Berthollet (Berthollet, Claude-Louis), Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac (Gay-Lussac, Joseph-Louis), and Pierre-Louis Dulong (Dulong, Pierre-Louis) in Paris in 1818 and 1819. He also maintained a vast correspondence with professional colleagues. Berzelius was equally industrious in disseminating information about his ideas, methods, and results. To this end, he published his scientific articles in French, German, and English and frequently revised his Textbook of Chemistry in French and German editions that were often prepared with the help of current or former students. Finally, as perpetual secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, he issued annual reports from 1821 to 1848 (in Swedish, German, and French) on the progress of science. These reports not only announced his major findings but also offered Olympian pronouncements that were eagerly anticipated, sometimes feared, but long highly respected.

      Among Berzelius's other accomplishments were his improvements of laboratory apparatuses and techniques used for chemical and mineral analysis, especially solvent extraction, elemental analysis, quantitative wet chemistry, and qualitative mineral analysis. His mastery of technique in mineral chemistry derived from his close working relationship with the Swedish mining technologist Johan Gottlieb Gahn (Gahn, Johan Gottlieb), who had served as assistant to Berzelius's predecessor, Torbern Bergman (Bergman, Torbern Olof). Berzelius used his textbooks and his classic, widely translated monograph On the Use of the Blowpipe (1820) to standardize and disseminate Gahn's methods. Berzelius also characterized and named two new concepts: “ isomerism,” in which chemically diverse substances possess the same composition; and “ catalysis,” in which certain chemical reactions are facilitated by the presence of substances that are themselves unaffected. He also coined the term protein while attempting to apply a dualistic organic chemistry to the constituents of living things.

Evan M. Melhado

Additional Reading

For a readily available biographical overview, see Henry M. Leicester, “Jöns Jacob Berzelius” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 2 (1970), pp. 90–97. To gain a better understanding of how Berzelius's work was contextalized within romantic science, see Evan M. Melhado and Tore Frängsmyr (eds.), Enlightenment Science in the Romantic Era: The Chemistry of Berzelius and Its Cultural Setting (1992). For a thorough overview of Berzelius's contributions to chemistry, see J.R. Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. 4 (1964). J. Erik Jorpes, Jac. Berzelius: His Life and Work, trans. from Swedish (1966, reissued 1970), provides an informative life history.Evan M. Melhado

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