Submitted by sapphics4satan t3_1170s3h in askscience
VT_Squire t1_j9c7wmf wrote
a long time ago....
"element" was just a word, nothing like how we use it today. Earth, wind, water, fire... then in the 1600s some clever guy thought about what we know today as chemical elements. That was the advent of "the atom." This meant the irreducible composition of a substance. By that point, you had early chemistry/alchemy actively TRYING to decompose substances into their basic elements and experimenting with different combinations. Like your question of gold... well, could it be reduced further? No? Okay, then it's an element.
It wasn't until the early 1900s that the modern definition of the element rooted in numbers of electrons and protons and such took hold. A few centuries worth of experimentation turned out to have some useful merit. Within a few decades of this, we built the bomb and haven't had a world war ever since.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Spats_McGee t1_j9ckytw wrote
Actually if I understand correctly scientists in the 1700's and 1800's understood ideas like "combining ratios" that were antecedents to modern chemistry. So, they'd know that 2 parts hydrogen 1 part oxygen was water, etc, long before they understood the structure of the atom (which was Rutherford in 190x).
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