- What tipped Rayleigh off that something was wrong with atmospheric nitrogen?
Inorganic Chemistry
The chemistry of non-organic compounds and elements.
- How was indigo dye produced before von Baeyer's synthesis, and what trade did that production support?
- How long did it take von Baeyer to work out indigo's molecular structure and achieve synthesis?
- What catalyst and conditions did Haber use to combine nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia?
- What role did Carl Bosch play in turning Haber's discovery into an industrial process?
- How did the Haber-Bosch process end up serving both fertilizer production and explosives manufacturing?
- Why does chlorophyll use magnesium at its centre instead of the iron that haemoglobin relies on?
- How does the Haber-Bosch process turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia for fertiliser?
- What role did Fritz Haber play in Germany's chemical weapons programme during the First World War?
- Why did the Allied nations object to Haber receiving the 1918 Nobel Prize?
- What nickel-steel composition gives Invar a thermal expansion coefficient near zero?
- How did the isotope concept explain the bewildering variety of lead produced by uranium ore decay chains?
- Why did neon's atomic weight of 20.2 puzzle chemists before Aston's work?
- What engineering problems did Carl Bosch have to solve to industrialize Haber's ammonia synthesis at scale?
- What practical inventions did Langmuir produce alongside his theoretical work on surfaces?
- What accident in Davisson's lab led him to notice electrons behaving like waves?
- How did Cockcroft and Walton's accelerator split a lithium nucleus using a beam of protons?
- Why did borane molecules like diborane seem to violate conventional chemical bonding rules?
- What is a three-centre, two-electron bond and how does it let electrons be shared across three atoms at once?
- How did X-ray crystallography help Lipscomb map the structure of borane compounds?
- How did Lipscomb's work on boranes extend to understanding other electron-deficient molecules found in nature?
- What is the difference between the inner-sphere and outer-sphere mechanisms of electron transfer that Henry Taube identified?
- What existing technology inspired the design of Under-Ease's odor-filtering vent?
- What did Ertl's work reveal about the molecular steps of the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis?