Science Bytes
A History of Acid-Base Chemistry, Part 1: Sour, Slippery, and Misunderstood
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Part 1 of 3. Before anyone wrote H+ on a chalkboard, acids were known by their sour bite and bases by their slippery feel. We trace the first real theories of acidity: Robert Boyle's color-changing indicators, Lavoisier's confident but wrong claim that oxygen is what makes acids acidic, Humphry Davy's experiment that demolished it, and Justus von Liebig's hydrogen theory that set the stage for…