Daniel Rutherford: The Chemist Who Isolated the "Noxious" Air

On November third, seventeen forty-nine, Daniel Rutherford was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was a physician, chemist, and botanist, and his academic field was experimental chemistry and plant physiology.

Rutherford is credited with being the first to isolate and identify nitrogen as a distinct element, although he did not call it that. In seventeen seventy-two, while still a student, he conducted a groundbreaking experiment. He removed oxygen from confined air by letting a candle burn until it extinguished, and then removed the remaining carbon dioxide with a calcium hydroxide filter. The gas that remained could not support combustion or life, and Rutherford called it "noxious air" or "phlogisticated air," as he believed it was saturated with phlogiston – a hypothetical substance thought at the time to be released during combustion. Although his theoretical understanding was incorrect, his experimental isolation of nitrogen was accurate and pioneering. His work laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the atmosphere's composition and helped establish nitrogen as a fundamental element in chemistry.