Chemistry Video - Jon Jacob Berzelius

Okay, so this is Jean Jacob Brazilius. This is one of those guys that was pretty easy to memorize on the chapter 4 picture test. Cause I mean, look at him. He has such a unique look, I guess is one way you could put it. Honestly, he kind of reminds me of a really, and I mean really, deformed mouse. But anyways, he was born on August 20th of 1779 in Linköping, Sweden. His father was Samuel Brazilius, who was a teacher, and his mother was Elisabeth Dorothea, who was a homemaker. For his education, he studied medicine at Uppsala University. Now here's some more info about him. In 1807, he was appointed professor in chemistry and pharmacy at the Karolinska Institute. In 1808, he went from a regular member of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to serving as its principal functionary. You know, I don't know what that means, but good for him. Something interesting I found out is that he worked pretty close with the first female chemist in Sweden, Anna Sundström. Sadly, he died on August 7th of 1848 at the age of 68 years old. This was sad because it was only 13 days before his 69th birthday. Now if you couldn't tell from where he was born, where he went to school, and where he worked, he was a Swedish chemist. He's also known as one of the fathers of chemistry. That's right, I said one of, because there were multiple fathers of chemistry, which in my opinion was pretty progressive for those times. I guess now it's time to look at his chemistry history. He had made a lot of contributions to chemistry. In fact, in Sweden, he wasn't just known as the father of chemistry, he was known as the father of Swedish chemistry. You see, he made some pretty basic contributions I guess. He helped discover cerium, selenium, silicon, zirconium, titanium, and thorium. He also introduced rubber tubing into the lab, as well as filter paper for analytical chemistry. He also created the system of electrochemical dualism. Here's some more of his contributions. He helped determine the atomic weights for 45 of the 49 no elements at the time. He also formulated the difference between organic and inorganic compounds, which thank god because I do not want to learn about organic compounds in regular chemistry. He also established the law of constant proportions. So yeah, this is John Jacob Brazilius, a Swedish, very progressive chemist.