Berzelius, Jakob

ber-zee'li-us, Jakob (1779-1848), a noted Swedish chemist. He was the son of a schoolmaster. He became a student at Upsala, a professor of medicine at Stockholm, and professor of chemistry in the Medical Institute of Stockholm. Berzelius was a tireless worker. Among other contributions to science was a table giving the weight of 2,000 substances, elements and compounds, as compared with the weight of oxygen, which he took instead of hydrogen as a basis. Another contribution by Berzelius which will be appreciated by young students is a system of chemical notation. First he gave each element a symbol, usually the first letter or two of its Latin, or, occasionally, its Greek name. See table in article on CHEMISTRY. Hydrogen, for instance, he called H, and oxygen O. To indicate the number of atoms of an element entering into a compound it was only necessary to add a figure to the symbol, thus to denote water he wrote H2O, indicating that it is made up of the two elements of hydrogen and oxygen in the proportion of two atoms of the former to one atom of the latter. Instead of a long statement of the composition of ordinary cane sugar, the chemist writes C12H22O11, indicating that 12 atoms of carbon, 22 of hydrogen, and 11 of oxygen unite to form a molecule of cane sugar. Grape sugar he expresses as C6H12O6, indicating a little less carbon in proportion to the other elements. These expressions by means of symbols and weights are not only brief and clear, but they are understood at once the world over, no matter what language the chemist may speak. Thus cane sugar is written C12H22O11 in all textbooks, whether they are printed in the language used in the schools of France, England, Russia, or Japan. We also owe to Berzelius many other important discoveries and critical analyses of chemical problems. See Chemistry