Amedeo Avogadro Facts
Amedeo Avogadro Facts
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| Interesting Amedeo Avogadro Facts: |
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| Born to a noble family of Turin, Avogadro's full name was Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro di Quaregna e di Cerreto, and he was the Count of Quaregna and Cerreto. |
| His early career was in church law, although he studied math and physics extensively. |
| One of his first scientific publications was an article, "Essay on Determining the Relative Masses of the Elementary Molecules of Bodies and the Proportions by Which They Enter These Combinations." |
| While serving as a physics professor at the University of Turin, Avogadro supported the revolution and was therefore dismissed under the auspices of being granted more time to work on his research. |
| He was reinstated, and the king decreed a constitution be established; Avogadro went on to teach physics at the university for another twenty years. |
| Avogadro held numerous interesting positions throughout his lifetime and was credited with introducing the metric system to his region. |
| Some of these important positions included work in statistics, weights and measures, and meteorology, although his work in setting educational standards for public schools may have been the most vital to the country as a whole. |
| Following the publication of another physicist's work on the mass and volume of gases when combined, Avogadro first proposed that there was a difference between atoms and molecules. |
| This first distinction was one of the most vital understandings in all of physics, and Avogadro was the first to propose that gases are made up of molecules and that molecules are made up of atoms. |
| From there, Avogadro established Avogadro's Law, which says that equal volumes of different gases when combined will have an established relationship in their masses and that this relationship will also correlate to their molecular weights. |
| At the time though, the words atom and molecule were essentially thought to be the same thing, so it was Avogadro who determined that there were different kinds of molecules. |
| Due to his work, scientists quickly came to understand that mass and weight are not the same thing, either. |
| Unfortunately, Avogadro's work was not well received within the scientific community; it was only four years after his death that research from other scientists began to prove his theories correct. |
| This later experimentation also proved what Avogadro's Law had demonstrated, that it was not only seemingly accurate for determining molecular weight of a gas, but also atomic weight. |
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