Avagadro

1 Pages 348 Words

Avagadro was born Lorenzo Romano Amadeo Carlo Avogadro. Now it is obvious why he just went by Amedeo Avagadro! He was born in Turnin, Italy to a very wealthy family of lawyers. When he was only sixteen years old, he had already earned his bachelor of jurisprudence. Four years later he then gained his doctorate degree and began to practice law. Although Avagadro had a very successful legal career, he was still interested in natural philosophy. He decided to study physics and mathematics privately. His first scientific research was conducted on electricity with the help of his brother, Felice. In 1809, Avagadro became a professor of natural philosophy at the college of Vercelli.
In 1811, Avagadro published an article in Journal de physique that drew the distinction between the atom and the molecule. He stated that Dalton had confused concepts of molecules and atoms. Avagadro stated that “equal volumes of all gases at the same temperature and pressure contain the same number of molecules”, which is known now as Avogadro’s Principle. Avogadro’s work went neglected until it was presented by Stanislao Cannizarro at the Karlsruhe Conference in 1860 where he showed that Avogadro’s Principle could not only determine molar mass but also that is could determine atomic mass.
The idea of the mole was introduced long after Avogadro. A molecular weight in grams of any substance contains the same number of molecules, and then according to Avogadro’s Principle, the molar volumes of all gases should then be the same. So now the number of molecules in one mole is called Avogadro’s number. The number wasn’t actually determined by Avogadro and he had no knowledge of moles. The value of Avogadro’s number is 6.0221367 x 1023. This is actually an extremely large number. An illustration to help you see how big this number actually is, would be if Avogadro’s number was the number of standard soft drink cans, they wou...