Discovery of bromine

Bromine was discovered in the 1820s, and two chemists reached the discovery independently. The French chemist Antoine Jerome Balard, then a young assistant in Montpellier, noticed a reddish-brown liquid with a strong smell when he treated the brine from salt marshes with chlorine, and he announced the new element in 1826. The German student Carl Jacob Lowig had obtained the same substance in Heidelberg in 1825 but published later because of delays in his work. The name comes from the Greek bromos, meaning stench. Bromine and mercury are the only elements that are liquid at room temperature under normal conditions. Bromine compounds were used in early photography and as flame retardants and sedatives, and they have been valued in many chemical processes.

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