Abstract
PATIENCE has its limits and modesty may be overdone. I am moved to these reflections by a three-page note in the Journal of the Chemical Society to hand to-day. I am carried back forty years, to a meeting at the society, in March 1885, when a shy Oxford graduate, a worker in Mr. H. B. Dixon's laboratory, told us practically that charcoal and phosphorus could not be burnt in dry oxygen. Actually, he told us less, as he did not then go nor has he since gone beyond-his facts. That, however, was the inference to be drawn from his work, taken in conjunction with that of Cowper, Dixon, Wanklyn and others, on the effect of drought in checking chemical interactions. I there and then stated what I will now venture to term the theory of chemical action, chary as I am always of using the word, if there be the least reason to rest more faith in honest doubt than in a creed. In a sentence, that theory is, that chemical action, of whatever kind, is essentially electrolytic: consequently, change takes place only when the potentially interacting substances constitute an electrolytic circuit: such circuit appears always to be one of three components, of which one, necessarily, is an electrolyte. I was, therefore, able to say that hydrogen and oxygen would not and could not interact; further, that even when “wetted” they would not interact, as water was not an electrolyte: only when the water was made “conducting”, by the presence of a dissolved “salt”, would change be possible.
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ARMSTRONG, H. The Conditions of Chemical Change. Nature 116, 537 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116537a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116537a0
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