Does anybody know where nitrogen was discovered?
Nitrogen (Latin nitrogenium, where nitrum (from Greek nitron) means “native soda” (see niter), and genes means “forming”) is formally considered to have been discovered by a Scottish physician and chemist Daniel Rutherford in 1772, who called it noxious air or fixed air. That there was a fraction of air that did not support combustion was well known to the late 18th century chemist. Nitrogen was also studied at about the same time by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Henry Cavendish, and Joseph Priestley, who referred to it as burnt air or phlogisticated air. Nitrogen gas was inert enough that Antoine Lavoisier referred to it as azote, from the Greek word αζωτος meaning “lifeless”. Animals died in it, and it was the principal component of air in which animals had suffocated and flames had burned to extinction.
