The oxidases and other oxygen - catalysts concerned in biological oxidations / by J. H. Kastle.

  • Joseph Hoeing Kastle
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The oxidases and other oxygen - catalysts concerned in biological oxidations / by J. H. Kastle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/168 (page 9)
    Chapter I. THEORIES OF OXIDATION. In the period which elapsed between the classic researches of Lavoisier on Combustion (1774-1785) and the discovery of ozone by Schoenbein in 1840, a number of interesting and important obser- vations had accumulated in the literature concerning the influence exerted by one substance on the oxidation of another by air or oxygen. Thus in 1806 D6sormes and Clement (137) pointed out that nitric acid is not the principal agent concerned in the complete oxidation of the sulfur in the leaden-chamber process for the manufacture of sul- furic acid, but its ''base,” nitric oxide (le gaz nitreux), which takes oxygen from atmospheric air in order to ofler it to the sulfurous acid in a condition capable of accomplishing its oxidation. A few years later it was observed by Vogel _(443) that hydrogen and oxygen combine at low temperatures under the influence of charcoal. Then followed the numerous and interesting observations by Sir Humphrey Davy (134), Edmund Davy (l32-138), Erman (167), Pleischl (328), and others on the remarkable power of platinum and other metals of the platinum group, such as iridium, osmium, and palladium, to effect the slow combustion, or under certain conditions even the actual ignition, of combustible gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, etc., in an atmosphere containing oxygen, and the rapid conversion of alcohol into acetic acid, observations which culminated in Davy’s lamp without flame (see Erman 167), Doebereiner’s lamp (141), and the rapid method for the production of acetic acid. The effect of various substances on the oxidation of combustible gases and vapors was also exhaustively investigated by Dulong and Thenard (151~152), with the result that various metals, such as iridium, palladium, rhodium, gold, silver, mercury, nickel, cobalt, and iron, in spongy or pulverulent form, were found to accomplish the same changes as platinum, and that to a degree at least such changes can also be brought about by certain nonmetallic substances, such as car- bon, pumice stone, porcelain, glass, and quartz crystals, at tempera- tures under 350° 0., while salt, fluorspar, and marble did not appear to act to a sensible extent within these limits. These changes, they concluded, could not be ascribed entirelj’ to electrical phenomena, as was at first supposed, and they explained them on the assumption of the condensation of large volumes of gas on the surface of the sub-