ABSTRACT
Hydrogen had been unknowingly produced somewhere around the end of the fifteenth century, but its discovery was a process that took about two hundred years. The discovery of hydrogen as an element also proceeded by fits and starts. The early Chinese reportedly were the first to doubt that water was an indivisible element. Cavendish, a rich English nobleman, who was "extremely strange" in his personal characteristics, was the first to discover and describe some of hydrogen's qualities. In a landmark experiment, Lavoisier combined hydrogen and oxygen, producing 45 grams of water that are preserved in the French Academy of Science. The final isolation and identification of hydrogen happened more or less concurrently with the unraveling of the secrets of oxygen in the second half of the eighteenth century, largely because the scientists were investigating both air and water. Robert Boyle, for instance, was researching artificial gases— "factitious air," as he called them—producing hydrogen from diluted sulfuric acid and iron.
