page_title: Timeline of chemistry
section_title: 17th and 18th centuries
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of chemistry / 17th and 18th centuries
context_page_description: This timeline of chemistry lists important works, discoveries, ideas, inventions, and experiments that significantly changed humanity's understanding of the modern science known as chemistry, defined as the scientific study of the composition of matter and of its interactions. The history of chemistry in its modern form arguably began with the Irish scientist Robert Boyle, though its roots can be traced back to the earliest recorded history.
  Early ideas that later became incorporated into the modern science of chemistry come from two main sources. Natural philosophers used deductive reasoning in an attempt to explain the behavior of the world around them. Alchemists were people who used experimental techniques in an attempt to extend the life or perform material conversions, such as turning base metals into gold.
  In the 17th century, a synthesis of the ideas of these two disciplines, that is the deductive and the experimental, leads to the development of a process of thinking known as the scientific method. With the introduction of the scientific method, the modern science of chemistry was born.
context_section_description: 1605
  Sir Francis Bacon publishes The Proficience and Advancement of Learning, which contains a description of what would later be known as the scientific method.
  1605
  Michal Sedziwój publishes the alchemical treatise A New Light of Alchemy which proposed the existence of the "food of life" within air, much later recognized as oxygen.
  1615
  Jean Beguin publishes the Tyrocinium Chymicum, an early chemistry textbook, and in it draws the first-ever chemical equation.
  1637
  René Descartes publishes Discours de la méthode, which contains an outline of the scientific method.
  1648
  Posthumous publication of the book Ortus medicinae by Jan Baptist van Helmont, which is cited by some as a major transitional work between alchemy and chemistry, and as an important influence on Robert Boyle.  The book contains the results of numerous experiments and establishes an early version of the law of conservation of mass.
  1661
  Robert Boyle publishes The Sceptical Chymist, a treatise on the distinction between chemistry and alchemy.  It contains some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reaction, and marks the beginning of the history of modern chemistry.
  1662
  Robert Boyle proposes Boyle's law, an experimentally based description of the behavior of gases, specifically the relationship between pressure and volume.
  1735
  Swedish chemist Georg Brandt analyzes a dark blue pigment found in copper ore. Brandt demonstrated that the pigment contained a new element, later named cobalt.
  1754
  Joseph Black isolates carbon dioxide, which he called "fixed air".
  1757
  Louis Claude Cadet de Gassicourt, while investigating arsenic compounds, creates Cadet's fuming liquid, later discovered to be cacodyl oxide, considered to be the first synthetic organometallic compound.
  1758
  Joseph Black formulates the concept of latent heat to explain the thermochemistry of phase changes.
  1766
  Henry Cavendish discovers hydrogen as a colorless, odourless gas that burns and can form an explosive mixture with air.
  1773–1774
  Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley independently isolate oxygen, called by Priestley "dephlogisticated air" and Scheele "fire air".
  1778
  Antoine Lavoisier, considered "The father of modern chemistry", recognizes and names oxygen, and recognizes its importance and role in combustion.
  1787
  Antoine Lavoisier publishes Méthode de nomenclature chimique, the first modern system of chemical nomenclature.
  1787
  Jacques Charles proposes Charles's law, a corollary of Boyle's law, describes relationship between temperature and volume of a gas.
  1789
  Antoine Lavoisier publishes Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, the first modern chemistry textbook.  It is a complete survey of (at that time) modern chemistry, including the first concise definition of the law of conservation of mass, and thus also represents the founding of the discipline of stoichiometry or quantitative chemical analysis.
  1797
  Joseph Proust proposes the law of definite proportions, which states that elements always combine in small, whole number ratios to form compounds.
  1800
  Alessandro Volta devises the first chemical battery, thereby founding the discipline of electrochemistry.
caption: Title page of The Sceptical Chymist by Robert Boyle (1627–91)
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