Posted
on February 8, 2014
This
chemist and businessman was the first person known to have isolated
morphine and the person who discovered the element iodine.
Unfortunately, Bernard Courtois, born in France on this date in 1777,
earned very little money or renown for his discoveries.
Courtois's
dad had a business making potassium nitrate for gunpowder. Somehow,
despite all the wars fought in Europe at the time, the business
limped along and eventually failed. Apparently the elder Courtois
died shortly after getting out of debtor's prison.
Courtois
took over the family business, interrupting his chemist job and work
on morphine. At one point there was a shortage of wood ash, from
which potassium nitrate was obtained, so he started getting it from
seaweed, which was plentiful on the nearby beaches. It was while he
was isolating sodium and potassium from seaweed ash that Courtois
made his most important discovery.
It
was an accident (as so many discoveries are)!Courtois apparently added too much sulfuric acid to the seaweed ash, and he observed a violet vapor cloud that condensed on cold objects, forming shiny dark crystals.
Courtois
experimented with the substance and found that
it combined easily with hydrogen and phosphorous but not so easily
with oxygen or carbon. He tried to make it explode—aren't chemists
always trying to do that?—and found that ammonia did the trick.
Courtois
turned his findings over to two chemists, who announced the discovery
of iodine in 1813. Apparently Courtois was eventually
acknowledged as the true discoverer and was even awarded 6,000 francs
for his finding—but, as his obituary later pointed out, he didn't
take out a certificate of invention and continued to struggle
financially until he died pretty much penniless at age 62.
Why
do we iodize table salt?
Iodine
deficiency leads to problems—problems that about two billion
people in the world face. As a matter of fact, iodine deficiency is “the leading preventable cause of intellectual and developmental disabilities.” In other words, it's a common problem, but it's simple to solve the problem:
Simply put a tiny amount of iodine in table salt. Cheap and easy.
Did
you know, though, that an opened container of iodized table salt will lose
its iodine content in about four weeks? Yikes—my salt container is
way older than that!
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