Discovery of sulfur

Sulfur, known as brimstone, has been familiar since antiquity, found as yellow crystals around volcanoes and hot springs. It was used for fumigation, in medicine and in religious ritual, and later in gunpowder. It was only in 1777 that the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier established that sulfur is an element and not a compound, a conclusion that was part of his wider reform of chemistry. For centuries Sicily was the world's main source of the material, and mining there was dangerous and hard. In the nineteenth century, sulfur became central to industry as the raw material for sulfuric acid, one of the most widely used industrial chemicals. In 1839 Charles Goodyear's vulcanization process used it to make rubber stable and durable.

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