The letters of Faraday and Schoenbein, 1836-1862 : with notes, comments and references to contemporary letters / edited by Georg W.A. Kahlbaum and Francis V. Darbishire.

Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The letters of Faraday and Schoenbein, 1836-1862 : with notes, comments and references to contemporary letters / edited by Georg W.A. Kahlbaum and Francis V. Darbishire. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    forget the highly deplorable state of the affairs of Europe, I have these last three months shut up mvsclf in my laboratory and I may say turned my back upon the rest of the world, avoiding even to touch a newspaper or to hear a s}dlable spoken about politics. Dry and stale as the subject must be to a mind grievously affected, I mean oxigen, I have taken it u]j again and worked upon it harder than I ever did. And I think not (juite for nothing. First I ascertained the hypo- chlorites, manganates and ferrates (or rather the acids of those salts) to be Ozonides, i. e. decomi)osable by the Antozonides: HO3, KOa, BaOa etc. Then I tried to show, that the nascent state of oxigen as such has nothing to do with the oxidizing powers of that element, and during the last six weeks I have almost exclusively occupied myself with what I call the chemical polarization of neutral oxygen.' After having once ascertained a number of facts (known to }'ou) from which I drew the inference, that there arc two active kinds of oxigen standing to each other in the relation of + to —, I thought it possible, even likely, that both kinds of active oxigen are at the same time produced out of inactive O, as often as one of them makes its appearance. Proceeding from those notions I first looked for HO -f © as a jjroduction of the slow com- bustion of phosphorus, during which process, at it is well known, ozonized oxigen = 0 is engendered. My conjecture i)roved fully correct, peroxide of hydrogen being produced and con- tained in the sour fluid called phosphatic acid. And so closely are the two facts connected with one another, namely the ozonisation of inactive oxigen and the formation of H()2, that you will never obtain the one substance without the other. Being once sure of that important coincidence, I extended my researches to the productions of the slow combustion of Ether and found to my no small satisfaction, that in this case too ' cf. Uber die chemische Polarisation des Sauerstoffs. Poggend. Annal. Bd. 108. 1859. p. 471.