Joseph Black Essay

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Joseph Black was one of fifteen children born to parents John and Margaret Black. John Black Sr. was a wine merchant from Scotland decent. Margaret Black was also a member of a wine trading family from Aberdeen. Young Joseph Black was sent to school to learn Latin and Greek in Belfast. When he was 16, he enrolled at Glasgow University to study arts. However, his father thought Joseph should study something more useful so he chose medicine. The professor at Glasgow to teach medicine was William Cullen, who in 1747 instituted the first lectures in Chemistry. At one point, Black moved to Edinburgh but eventually returned to Glasgow as a Professor of Anatomy and Botany, and Lecturer in Chemistry. The next year, he was appointed to Professor of …show more content…

Although Black’s discovery of carbon dioxide was said to lay the foundation for modern chemistry, it wasn’t the only discovery he is credited for. He was the first to conclude that heat and temperature were two different things. Black used water as a universal substance to show that heat is energy, in which may be transported through moving and colliding molecules and the idea that temperature is the measurement of the average motion or kinetic energy of the molecules. He demonstrated this with a bucket of ice monitored by temperature constantly. The ice continually melted, but the temperature remained constant. Black is also well known for his discovery of latent heat, the heat required to convert a solid into a liquid or vapor, or a liquid into a vapor, without change of temperature. Latent heat was con be expressed in two ways: the heat can be absorbed if the change involves solid to liquid or liquid to gas or the heat can be released if the change involves gas to liquid or liquid to solid. Black took this idea and developed “specific heat”, in which is defined as the measured amount of heat required to raise the temperature of a substance by a specified number of degrees. Joseph Black was never especially healthy, particularly because he suffered from childhood infections and eventually rheumatic problems later on. Strangely for those days, Black became a vegetarian and suffered from vitamin D

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