FT 130: History of Food Chemistry

(1780-1850)

Famous Scientists:

Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Swedish Pharmacist (1742-1786). His works marked the beginning of accurate analytical
research in agricultural and food chemistry
 Discovered chlorine, glycerol and oxygen (3 years before Priestly but unpublished)
 Isolated and studied the properties of lactic acid
 Prepared mucic acid by oxidation of lactose
 Devised means in preserving vinegar by means of heat
 Isolated citric acid from lemon juice and gooseberries
 Isolated malic acid from apples
 Tested 20 common fruits for citric, malic and tartaric acids

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794). He was instrumental in the final rejection of the Phlogiston Theory (Becker,
1667).
 Established the fundamental principles of combustion organic analysis
 First to show that the process of fermentation could be expressed as a balanced equation
 Made the first attempt to determine the elemental composition of alcohol
 Presented first papers on organic acids of various fruits

Theodore de Saussure (1767 – 1845). Did much to formalize the principles of agricultural and food chemistry provided
by Lavoisier.
 Studied CO2 and O2 changes
 Studied plant nutrition during plant respiration
 Studied the mineral content of plants by ashing
 Made the first accurate elemental analyses of alcohol by combustion technique

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778-1850) and Louis Jacgues Thenard (1777-1857).

 Devised the first method for quantitatively determining the percentages of C, H and N in dry vegetable
substances. The oxidation technique did not, however, provide a procedure for estimating the quality of water
formed.

Sit Humphry Davy (1978-1829).

 Isolated the elements K, Na,l, Br, Cr, Ca, Mg and Sr.
 He wrote several books on agric and food chemistry in a course of lecture for the Board of Agric. In the 1st ed,
he stated that “ All the different parts of plants are capable of being decomposed into a few elements. Their
uses as food depend upon compound arrangements of these elements, which are capable of being produced
either from their organized parts, or from the juices they contain; and the examination of the nature of these
substances is an essential parts of agric. Chemistry.
 Law of Definite Proportion (Law of Constant Composition. This was first put forwarded by Joseph Proust
o A pure compound always consists of the same elements combined in the same proportions by weight.

1
  Ex. Fe2O3, Fe3O4
th
 5 ed: “ the most essential vegetable substances consists of H, O and C in different proportions, generally alone,
but in some few cases combined with azote (nitrogen)”.
Jons Jacob Berzelius (1779-1898) and Thomas Thomson (1773 – 1852)
 Resulted in the beginnings of organic formulas
 Determine the elemental component of 2000 compounds
 Law of Definite Proportions
 Worked on the water content of compounds
 Showed that the laws governing the composition of inorganic substances apply equally well to organic
substances.

Michel Eugene Chevreul (1786-1899)

 French chemist who pioneered the analysis of organic substances
 Did a classic research on animal fat which led to the discovery and naming of stearic and oleic acids
 Listed the elements that exist in organic compounds

William Beumont (1785-1853)

 An American surgeon who studied gastric digestion that destroyed the concept of Hippocrates that food
contained a single nutritive component
 His experiment was performed on a Canadian named Alexis St. Martin, whose musket wound afforded direct
access to the stomach interior, thereby enabling food to be introduced and subsequently examined for digestive
changes.

Justus von Liebig (1803-1873)

 Vinegar fermentation that shows that aldehyde as an intermediate product between alcohol and acetic acid
during the fermentation of vinegar
 Nitrogenous / non nitrogen
 He classified food as nitrogenous (vegetable fibrin, albumin, casein and animal flesh and blood) and non-
nitrogenous (fats, carbohydrates and alcoholic beverages).
 Published the first book on food chemistry , “Researches on the Chemistry of Food)
 He also studied the water-soluble constituents of muscle (creatinine, creatin, sarcosine, inosinic acid, lactic)