Scheele's Acids

From WikidChem

Before the Chemical Revolution there was: CARL WILHELM SCHEELE (1770s and 80s) and he had a chem lab (distillation, furnace heating, etc). He did not have a TA to guide him through it, however.

Scheele is best known as a chemist for purifying the salts of many acids (citric from lemons, lactic from bad milk, uric from urine, tartaric from tartar on wine casks, benzoic from gun gum benzoin, and oxalic from rhubarb…

Oxalic acid....from rhubarb? Well, rhubarb has a sharp/sour taste...."oxy" = sharp, just as latin root "ac" is sharp (as in acre, acid, acrid, etc)…So, it's a sharp/sour substance from rhubarb!

He is also credited with discoverying oxygen (fire-air as he called it....Lavoisier stole the credit), chlorine, and other substances

Most of his acids were carboxylic acids with a -COOH group (or more than one). This is a very common type of organic acids. Uric acid, however, did not have a carboxyl group....