I. Short Historical Introduction In the late 1880's, Svante Arrhenius proposed that acids were substances that delivered hydrogen ion to the solution. He has also pointed out that the law of mass ac

I. Introduction In 1923, within several months of each other, Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted (Denmark) and Thomas Martin Lowry (England) published essentially the same theory about how acids and bases b

I. Introduction Svante Arrhenius was one of the towering giants of chemistry in the years surrounding the turn of the century. His most important contribution to chemistry was also his first - the id

I. Antoine Lavoisier His basic idea was that acidity was caused by the presence of oxygen in the compound. In fact, Lavoisier (in September 1777) created the word oxygen. From the Greek (oxys = sour

The word acid and alkaline (older word for base) are derived from direct sensory experience. Acid Property #1. The word acid comes from the Latin word acere, which means "sour." All acids