사용자:KJS615/연습장

History and etymology

앙투안 라부아지에의 어린 시절

“carbon”이라는 이름은 석탄과 숯을 뜻하는 라틴어 carbo와 숯을 뜻하는 프랑스어 charbon에서 왔다. 한자어 탄소(炭素)는 독일어 Kohlenstoff에서 유래하였다.

탄소는 선사 시대부터 그을음과 숯의 형태로 이미 알려졌었다. 다이아몬드는 기원전 2500여년 경 중국에서 발견된 것으로 추정된다. 목탄 형태의 탄소는 고대 로마 시대 점토로 덮여 외부 공기의 출입을 차단하는 피라미드에서 목재를 가열함으로서 발견되었다.

1722년, 르네 앙투안 페르숄 드 레오뮈르는 철이 어떠한 물질을 흡수하면 강철이 된다는 것을 발견했는데, 오늘날 이 물질은 탄소임이 밝혀졌다. 1772년, 앙투안 라부아지에는 슟과 다이아몬드를 연소할 때, 그 어떤 물도 생성되지 않고 둘다 그램 당 같은 양의 이산화탄소가 생성된다는 것을 발견하여, 다이아몬드가 탄소의 한 형태임을 보여주었다. 1779년, 칼 빌헬름 셸레는 납의 한 형태로 여겨졌던 흑연이 철이 혼합되어 있는 숯의 한 형태이고, 질산으로 산화시키면 기체 형태의 산(이산화탄소)을 내놓는다는 사실을 발견하였다.

Carbon was discovered in prehistory and was known in the forms of soot and charcoal to the earliest human civilizations. Diamonds were known probably as early as 2500 BCE in China, while carbon in the form of charcoal was made around Roman times by the same chemistry as it is today, by heating wood in a pyramid covered with clay to exclude air.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele

In 1722, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur demonstrated that iron was transformed into steel through the absorption of some substance, now known to be carbon. In 1772, Antoine Lavoisier showed that diamonds are a form of carbon; when he burned samples of charcoal and diamond and found that neither produced any water and that both released the same amount of carbon dioxide per gram. In 1779, Carl Wilhelm Scheele showed that graphite, which had been thought of as a form of lead, was instead identical with charcoal but with a small admixture of iron, and that it gave "aerial acid" (his name for carbon dioxide) when oxidized with nitric acid. In 1786, the French scientists Claude Louis Berthollet, Gaspard Monge and C. A. Vandermonde confirmed that graphite was mostly carbon by oxidizing it in oxygen in much the same way Lavoisier had done with diamond. Some iron again was left, which the French scientists thought was necessary to the graphite structure. In their publication they proposed the name carbone (Latin carbonum) for the element in graphite which was given off as a gas upon burning graphite. Antoine Lavoisier then listed carbon as an element in his 1789 textbook.

A new allotrope of carbon, fullerene, that was discovered in 1985 includes nanostructured forms such as buckyballs and nanotubes. Their discoverers – Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley – received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996. The resulting renewed interest in new forms lead to the discovery of further exotic allotropes, including glassy carbon, and the realization that "amorphous carbon" is not strictly amorphous.