Jöns Jacob Berzelius

Berzelius was born in the parish of Väversunda in Östergötland in Sweden. His father Samuel Berzelius was a school teacher in the nearby city of Linköping, and his mother Elizabeth Dorothea Sjösteen was a homemaker.[7] His parents were both from families of church pastors. Berzelius lost both his parents at an early age. His father died in 1779, after which his mother married a pastor Anders Eckmarck, who gave Berzelius a basic education including knowledge of the natural world. Following the death of his mother in 1787, relatives in Linköping took care of him. There he attended the school today known as Katedralskolan.[8] As a teenager, he took a position as a tutor at a farm nearby his home, during which time he became interested in collecting flowers and insects and their classification.[9]

Berzelius later enrolled as a medical student at Uppsala University, from 1796 to 1801. Anders Gustaf Ekeberg, the discoverer of tantalum, taught him chemistry during this time. He worked as an apprentice in a pharmacy, during which time he also learned practical matters in the laboratory such as glassblowing.[9] On his own during his studies, he successfully repeated the experimentation conducted by Swedish chemist Carl William Scheele which led to Scheele's discovery of oxygen.[8] He also worked with a physician in the Medevi mineral springs. During this time, he conducted an analysis of the water from this source. Additionally as part of his studies, in 1800 Berzelius learned about Alessandro Volta's electric pile, the first device that could provide a constant electric current (i.e., the first battery). He constructed a similar battery for himself, consisting of alternating disks of copper and zinc, and this was his initial work in the field of electrochemistry.[5][9]

As thesis research in his medical studies, he examined the influence of galvanic current on several diseases. This line of experimentation produced no clear cut evidence for such influence.[9] Berzelius graduated as a medical doctor in 1802. He worked as a physician near Stockholm until the chemist and mine-owner Wilhelm Hisinger recognized his abilities as an analytical chemist and provided him with a laboratory.[4]

In 1807, Berzelius was appointed professor in chemistry and pharmacy at the Karolinska Institute.[5] Between 1808 and 1836, Berzelius worked together with Anna Sundström, who acted as his assistant and was the first female chemist in Sweden.[10]

In 1808, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. At this time, the Academy had been stagnating for several years, since the era of romanticism in Sweden had led to less interest in the sciences. In 1818, Berzelius was elected the Academy's secretary and held the post until 1848. During Berzelius' tenure, he is credited with revitalising the Academy and bringing it into a second golden era (the first being the astronomer Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin's period as secretary from 1749 to 1783).[11] He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.[12] In 1827, he became correspondent of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands, and in 1830 associate member.[13] In 1837, he was elected a member of the Swedish Academy, on chair number 5.

Through much of his life, Berzelius suffered various medical ailments. These included recurrent migraine headaches and then later on he suffered from gout. He also had episodes of depression.[9]

In 1818, Berzelius had a nervous breakdown, said to be due to the stress of his work.[8] The medical advice he received was to travel and take vacation. However, during this time, Berzelius traveled to France to work in the chemical laboratories of Claude Louis Berthollet.[9]

In 1835, at the age of 56, he married Elisabeth Poppius, the 24-year-old daughter of a Swedish cabinet minister.[9]

He died on 7 August 1848 at his home in Stockholm, where he had lived since 1806.[14] He is buried in the Solna Cemetery.[8]

Daguerreotype of Berzelius.

Soon after arriving to Stockholm, Berzelius wrote a chemistry textbook for his medical students, Lärboki Kemien, which was his first significant scientific publication. He had conducted experimentation, in preparation for writing this textbook, on the compositions of inorganic compounds, which was his earliest work on definite proportions.[5] In 1813, he published an essay on the proportions of elements in compounds. The essay commenced with a general description, introduced his new symbolism, examined all the known elements, included a table of specific weights, and finished with a selection of compounds written in his new formalism.[15] In 1818, he compiled a table of relative atomic weights, where oxygen was set to 100, and which included all of the elements known at the time.[16] This work provided evidence in favour of the atomic theory proposed by John Dalton: that inorganic chemical compounds are composed of atoms of different elements combined in whole number amounts. In discovering that atomic weights are not integer multiples of the weight of hydrogen, Berzelius also disproved Prout's hypothesis that elements are built up from atoms of hydrogen.[17]^:682-683 Berzelius's last revised version of his atomic weight tables was first published in a German translation of his Textbook of Chemistry in 1826.[18]

In order to aid his experiments, he developed a system of chemical notation in which the elements composing any particular chemical compound were given simple written labels—such as O for oxygen, or Fe for iron—with their proportions in the chemical compound denoted by numbers. Berzelius thus invented the system of chemical notation still used today, the main difference being that instead of the subscript numbers used today (e.g., H₂O or Fe₂O₃), Berzelius used superscripts (H²O or Fe²O³).[19]

Berzelius is credited with discovering the chemical elements cerium and selenium and with being the first to isolate silicon and thorium. Berzelius discovered cerium in 1803[20] and selenium in 1817.[21]. Berzelius discovered how to isolate silicon in 1824,[22] and thorium in 1829.[23][24] Students working in Berzelius's laboratory also discovered lithium, lanthanum, and vanadium.[25]

Berzelius discovered silicon by repeating an experiment performed by Gay-Lussac and Thénard. In the experiment, Berzelius reacted silicon tetrafluoride with potassium metal and then purified its product by washing it until it became a brown powder. Berzelius recognized this brown powder as the new element of silicon, which he called silicium,[26] a name proposed earlier by Davy.[27]

Berzelius was the first to isolate zirconium in 1824, but pure zirconium was not produced until 1925, by Anton Eduard van Arkel and Jan Hendrik de Boer.[28]

Berzelius is credited with originating the chemical terms "catalysis," "polymer," "isomer," "protein" and "allotrope," although his original definitions in some cases differ significantly from modern usage.[29] As an example, he coined the term "polymer" in 1833 to describe organic compounds which shared identical empirical formulas but which differed in overall molecular weight, the larger of the compounds being described as "polymers" of the smallest.[30] At this time the concept of chemical structure had not yet been developed so that he considered only the numbers of atoms of each element. in this way, he viewed for example glucose (C₆H₁₂O₆) as a polymer of formaldehyde (CH₂O), even though glucose is not a polymer from the monomer formaldehyde, indicating that his definition of the term "polymer" was inadequate.[31]

Berzelius was the first person to make the distinction between organic compounds (those containing carbon), and inorganic compounds. In particular, he advised Gerardus Johannes Mulder in his elemental analyses of organic compounds such as coffee, tea, and various proteins. The term protein itself was coined by Berzelius, after Mulder observed that all proteins seemed to have the same empirical formula and came to the erroneous conclusion that they might be composed of a single type of very large molecule. The term is derived from the Greek, meaning "of the first rank", and Berzelius proposed the name because proteins were so fundamental to living organisms.[32]

In 1808, Berzelius discovered that lactic acid occurs in muscle tissue, not just in milk. He also determined that lactic acid occurs in two different optical isomers.[8]

Berzelius stated in 1810 that living things work by some mysterious "vital force",[33] a hypothesis called vitalism. Vitalism had first been proposed by prior researchers, although Berzelius contended that compounds could be distinguished by whether they required any organisms in their manufacture (organic compounds) or whether they did not (inorganic compounds). However, in 1828, Friedrich Wöhler accidentally obtained urea, an organic compound, by heating ammonium cyanate. This showed that an organic compound such as urea could be prepared synthetically and not exclusively by living organisms. Berzelius corresponded with Wöhler on the urea synthesis findings. However, the notion of vitalism continued to persist, until further work on abiotic synthesis of organic compounds providing overwhelming evidence against vitalism.[34][35]