#chemical notation

[sandwichmustbetasty]

xix century chemical notation is fucking with me and I feel I'm having a stroke

so I decided to be ambitious and find adolphe wurtz's paper on first synthesis of urethanes, cause there seems to be a great deal of confusion about both the date and the exact substrates used

problem is he's french and also discovered it in 1846

well. troublesome but let's do it

so I have some french sources and found the reaction I was looking for

except

I spot early on that something is very different and nitrogen is apparently labelled Az instead of N. that's fine, I can work with that

EXCEPT

for some reason in every compound there is a double carbon atom? like, we have chloroethane (the name is given below the formula), and the formula is C4H5Cl? Instead of C2H5Cl?????

and cyanogen chloride is C2NCl instead of CNCl (well, ClCN to be precise but let's follow their order)

also in alcohol we have doubled oxygen and at this point I'm seriously doubting my sanity

thank god all compounds were named cause I would not realise it's the correct equation

and there is definitely a valid reason for doubling the carbons, I just can't find it. and I need to know if it was a xix century thing or french thing

but I just know that there needs to be at least one chemistry freak on tumblr who has a weird amount of knowledge on french xix century chemical notation, so putting it here was the only reasonable thing to do

[eaganantomyphysiology-blog]

Section 2.5: Chemical notation is a concise method of describing chemical reactions

What is chemical notation?

  Chemical shorthand

What are the rules of chemical notation?

  1. Symbol of an element indicates one atom of that element

  2. Numbers preceding the symbol of an element indicated more than one atom of that element

  3. Subscript following the symbol of an element indicated a molecule with that number of atoms of that element

  4. Reactions --> Products

  5. Superscript plus or minus following the symbol of an element indicates and ion.

  6. Chemical reactions never create or destroy atoms, but rearrange them

What is a mole?

  Quantity with a weight in grams equal to an element's atomic weight

What is molecular weight?

  molecule is the sum of the atomic weights