Discovery of nitrogen

Nitrogen was identified in 1772 by the Scottish physician and chemist Daniel Rutherford, then a student at Edinburgh, who described a gas left over after burning a candle or allowing a small animal to breathe in a sealed container until the oxygen was used up. He called it noxious air, since it did not support combustion or life. Several contemporaries, including Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish, studied the gas at around the same time. Antoine Lavoisier named it azote, meaning lifeless, while the name nitrogen, meaning nitre-forming, was introduced by Jean-Antoine Chaptal in 1790. Nitrogen makes up about four fifths of Earth's atmosphere, and the Haber-Bosch process of the early twentieth century, which turns it into ammonia, made modern fertilizers possible.

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