Adapted from an image by William Ramsay (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
1749–1819
Daniel Rutherford
Discovered nitrogen in 1772.
Element
7NNitrogen
1772
Others had made the gas left over when a candle burns out in a closed jar of air, but Daniel Rutherford, a student at Edinburgh, was the first to describe it as a substance of its own, in his thesis of 1772. It put out flames and could not support life.
Keep exploring
Where the dates and stories on this page come from; each event on the timeline links to its own source.
- Daniel RutherfordEncyclopaedia Britannica
- NitrogenRoyal Society of Chemistry
- Daniel RutherfordWikipedia