Hydrogen Cyanide History of Discovery

Hydrogen cyanide was aboriginal abandoned from a dejected colorant (Prussian blue) which had been accepted back 1704 but whose anatomy was unknown. It is now accepted to be a allocation polymer with a circuitous anatomy and an empiric blueprint of hydrated adamant ferrocyanide. In 1752, the French chemist Pierre Macquer fabricated the important footfall of assuming that Prussian dejected could be adapted to adamant oxide additional a airy basic and that these could be acclimated to reconstitute it. The new basic was what we now apperceive as hydrogen cyanide. Following Macquer's lead, it was aboriginal able from Prussian dejected by the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1782, and was eventually accustomed the German name Blausäure (lit. "Blue acid") because of its acerb attributes in baptize and its ancestry from Prussian blue. In English, it became accepted bargain as prussic acid.

In 1787, the French chemist Claude Louis Berthollet showed that prussic acid did not accommodate oxygen, an important addition to acid theory, which had ahead accepted that acids have to accommodate oxygen (hence the name of oxygen itself, which is acquired from Greek elements that beggarly "acid-former" and are additionally calqued into German as Sauerstoff). In 1811, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac able pure, liquified hydrogen cyanide.[16] In 1815, Gay-Lussac deduced Prussic acid's actinic formula. The abolitionist cyanide in hydrogen cyanide was accustomed its name from cyan, not alone an English chat for a adumbration of dejected but the Greek chat for dejected (Ancient Greek: κυανοῦς), afresh attributable to its ancestry from Prussian blue.