Every chemical formula you write follows a Swedish chemist's shorthand
Writing Fe for iron and O for oxygen, with numbers for how many atoms join up, was Jacob Berzelius's idea. He set the numbers as superscripts; later chemists dropped them below the line. The same Swede coined protein, polymer, isomer and catalysis, words chemists and biologists now use every day.
Berzelius trained as a doctor at Uppsala between 1796 and 1801, and his thesis tested whether galvanic current affected disease. It found nothing clear. While a student he built his own battery of alternating copper and zinc discs, copying Volta's new pile, which set him on the road to electrochemistry. After graduating in 1802 he practised medicine near Stockholm until the mine owner Wilhelm Hisinger spotted his talent for analysis and gave him a laboratory. By 1807 he was professor of chemistry and pharmacy at the Karolinska Institute.
His great labour was weighing atoms. In an essay published in five parts during 1813 and 1814 he laid out his symbols, surveyed every known element and tabulated relative atomic masses with oxygen fixed at 100. The results backed Dalton's claim that compounds combine atoms in whole numbers. Because the weights were not neat multiples of hydrogen, they also sank Prout's idea that all elements were built from hydrogen atoms. He discovered cerium in 1803 and selenium in 1817, isolated silicon and thorium in 1824, and students in his lab found lithium, lanthanum and vanadium. From 1808 to 1836 he worked with Anna Sundström, Sweden's first female chemist.
Several of his coinages meant something different at first. In 1833 he called compounds with the same formula ratio but different weights polymers, so glucose counted as a polymer of formaldehyde, which it is not. The name protein, from Greek for first rank, came in 1838 after Gerardus Mulder wrongly concluded that all proteins shared one formula. Berzelius also showed in 1808 that lactic acid occurs in muscle, not only in milk.
Health troubled him throughout: migraines, gout and depression, plus a breakdown in 1818. Told to rest and travel, he went to Paris and worked in Berthollet's laboratory. As secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1818 to 1848 he pulled it out of years of stagnation. At 56 he married 24-year-old Elizabeth Poppius, and he died in Stockholm in 1848.
Source: Jöns Jacob Berzelius
