Iodine

What Is It?

Iodine and its compounds are primarily used in medicine, photography and in dyes. Although it is rare in the solar system and Earth's crust, the iodides are very soluble in water, and the element is concentrated in seawater. This mechanism helps to explain how the element came to be required in trace amounts by all animals and some plants, being by far the heaviest element known to be necessary to living organisms.

Iodine was discovered by Bernard Courtois in 1811. He was born to a manufacturer of saltpeter (a vital part of gunpowder). At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, France was at war and saltpeter was in great demand. Saltpeter produced from French niter beds required sodium carbonate, which could be isolated from seaweed washed up on the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. To isolate the sodium carbonate, seaweed was burned and the ash then washed with water. The remaining waste was destroyed by adding sulfuric acid. One day Courtois added too much sulfuric acid and a cloud of purple vapor rose. Courtois noted that the vapor crystallized on cold surfaces making dark crystals. Courtois suspected that this was a new element but lacked the money to pursue his observations.

However he gave samples to his friends, Charles Bernard Desormes (1777–1862) and Nicolas Clément (1779–1841), to continue research. He also gave some of the substance to Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), a well-known chemist at that time, and to André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836). On 29 November 1813, Dersormes and Clément made public Courtois’ discovery. They described the substance to a meeting of the Imperial Institute of France. On December 6, Gay-Lussac announced that the new substance was either an element or a compound of oxygen. Ampère had given some of his sample to Humphry Davy (1778–1829). Davy did some experiments on the substance and noted its similarity to chlorine. Davy sent a letter dated December 10 to the Royal Society of London stating that he had identified a new element. A large argument erupted between Davy and Gay-Lussac over who identified iodine first but both scientists acknowledged Courtois as the first to isolate the chemical element.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iodine

The Benefits

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